


language of the birds

by samarqand



Category: The Lord of the Rings (Movies), The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Anal Fingering, Blow Jobs, Elf Culture & Customs, Fingerfucking, M/M, Masturbation, Sexual Violence Mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:48:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25388575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samarqand/pseuds/samarqand
Summary: The only prince of the last Elven kingdom at the end of the Age of Elves contends with the advent of love and the War.
Relationships: Aragorn | Estel/Legolas Greenleaf, Legolas Greenleaf & Thranduil
Comments: 42
Kudos: 150





	1. before the war

**Author's Note:**

> This very self-indulgent fic borrows primarily (but not entirely) from the LOTR movies; that said, this chapter takes place in pre-FOTR Mirkwood. NB: there is some world-building of a distinct Silvan/Mirkwood culture, because Silvan culture is A+.

The procession begins after nightfall, when Legolas and his kindred hear a celestial rumbling rouse the forest. Stirred by the voice, his father the king rises from the table, leaving his wine and correspondences strewn across the dark wood.

“Wait for me,” Legolas tells him, and pivots to dash down the sinuous hall where Aragorn has retired to his guest chambers.

He taps at Aragorn’s door and hears Aragorn start, his stale panic lingering after an arduous journey's end; the Chieftain of the Dúnedain throws open the door. He has already begun divesting himself of his minimal Ranger’s armor -- the vambraces are gone from his sturdy, naked wrists. His heavy scabbard and belt are unslung from his hips and spread like a lover on his bed.

Aragorn looks surprised to see Legolas. He perhaps had expected to find Gandalf, his partner through inauspicious travels of late. He perhaps had expected naught but a crisis to come calling so late. He remains guarded. "Prince -- ," he begins, still loyal to formalities, which compels Legolas to rest his hand against Aragorn’s arm, that he may let this armor fall away, too.

“Come into the trees with us,” Legolas says, uncaring of whether Aragorn will think him a strange Elf for this request.

Aragorn only shuts the door behind him, a slow smile in answer.

A small party of Elves who join together to answer the weather’s call pour into the ancient dark, laughing and singing. One or two tipsy Elves eager to meet the night nearly step on Thranduil’s lustrous, trailing mantle in their ardor; their king smiles at them as he glides forth on the rich carpet of moss and root. Some paces into the woods, Thranduil simply slips out of his noble cloak and leaves it for the dormice and frogs who watch from the eaves of their leafy homes. The array of woodland drapes upon him in its stead. 

Legolas shares breath with the shadows, announcing himself with peaceable bearing, as he and Aragorn trot through the chill to meet his kin.

The line of Elves, wreathed in felicity, flicker through the trees fluently as any firefly; Legolas flows into their number, exchanging a soft word or two. He keeps his steps cautious of the cursive trajectory of snails and beetles below him. The Elves bend easterly with the Forest River to the borderlands, murmuring like the waters they follow. 

He hears Aragorn’s steady, assured footfall behind him and slows until they walk side by side. “We will go as far as the edge of our Woodland,” Legolas narrates, “and climb what tree shall have us. Then we see what we shall see across the river.”

“Am I permitted to this?“

“Yes,” Legolas responds, “it is I who coaxed you into our cabal, after all.”

He thinks after Gandalf back in the Elvenking's halls, enjoying richly deserved respite after his and Aragorn’s trial dragging Gollum bodily into the care of the Silvan Elves. It feels only right, Legolas tells himself before anyone may ask, that he offer this moment to Aragorn as some meager recompense for work that, by its finish, saw Aragorn and Gandalf staggering muddy and thin into the Realm.

Thranduil is perhaps of another mind; he, too, hears the distinctly mortal tread that oppresses the ferns and sends all manner of creatures scurrying into hiding. He spares a glance behind to mark Aragorn accompanying his son, and then furnishes Legolas with an exacting look.

Legolas only smiles toward him, sanguine as a crescent moon.

Thranduil mildly turns away.

The thick forest steadily tapers, heralding wizened ash trees that line the Realm's eastern border. The promenade of Elves and Man slow their pace to behold the open sky and exposed meadows and moors. 

Legolas offers his palms up to the troubled skies and smiles again to the dim starlight, before turning his gaze further East, beyond Elven domain. The unfamiliar topography manifests esoteric shapes, names Legolas has ruminated upon since his childhood tucked under the Elvenking’s rule: the mountains in ageless red, the hills unforgiving as iron, the wood sprawling wild.

All of them looked after by the stars now roiling with storm clouds.

The Elves begin singing an old song, first as one would a lullaby drifting on the high winds; with the next tumble of thunder, their voices resound clear and sharp. They create a circle surrounding the largest ash, where there is room for all, and turn their voices up to its green crown in supplication.

When the tree replies to their beseeching song with blessing, his folk begin winding their way up the bole and into the boughs, climbing one after another. Their voices beckon and haunt the oncoming storm. 

Aragorn, on the outside looking in, shivers.

“Do you see the veil of rain racing close?” Legolas murmurs to Aragorn, his gaze guiding Aragorn's northward to the Lonely Mountain; Aragorn nods when a spike of lightning gifts him a glimpse. The thunder erupts again, turbulent in Legolas’ core, and he laughs. “Come with me,” he urges Aragorn, and they join his folk disappearing into the ash tree.

There is no _talan_ here for comfort, no rope ladder: Legolas lets the ash suggest him upward with its faithful branches and weathered skin. Legolas climbs -- and then he cants easily downward to assist Aragorn where he needs -- though he doesn’t need Legolas' help, does he, this dauntless Ranger of the North who speaks faraway tales with fingers stained the colors of other lands. 

Together they scale the tree to the thrum of song; Legolas, too, sings to each branch he touches in Silvan dialect so rare now that he could not give Aragorn an interpretation. But Aragorn listens, drinking in the sound with his focus on the bursts of cream-white flowers that line their climb. And then on Legolas.

Within the tree’s fastness, they reach a height where the leaves yield to the open sky. Legolas perches on a bough, making space for Aragorn to settle beside him.

Thranduil slips onto a branch nearby. A few of his folk pick the ash flowers that float amid the foliage like seafoam. Deftly, they draw close to the Elvenking from their places in the leaves. They thread the blooms into Thranduil’s crown of branch and thorn with rhythmic, ritualistic fingers. They sing to the sky, to their king. Thranduil bows his head graciously to their handiwork.

Aragorn watches, looking moved.

Thunder shakes the tree. The branches sway, awoken. Lightning tears toward Lothlórien -- westerly, the direction Aragorn will soon return.

It comes easily, pretending this Chieftain, leader of fractured Men, has found home in Northern Mirkwood instead. It is simple to suppose the Woodland's every season shall in perpetuity be celebrated together with song and the prayerful clasp of hand to tree bark, and then hand to hand.

The curtain of rain draws in on them while every Elf sings invitation; the air turns charged, crackling. Atmosphere lifts the tips of Legolas’ hair and sends a pleasant frisson of communion through his body.

The Elves serenade the thunder. Their voices raise to greet the howl of storm.

And then the sky breaks apart and the rain pours on their heads. It is an immediate, primeval soak that douses skin through cloak and silk. It is a benediction to the beleaguered Realm.

Legolas smilingly turns his face to the sky while the other Elves laugh and whoop. 

Thranduil leans forward, hand cupping his shoulder, and kisses his wet forehead as though he were an elfling.

Legolas turns to find Aragorn smiling, relieved finally of the weight he had come shouldering into Mirkwood. The Man exhales foggy white in the torrent, casting his grey-eyed gaze over the vast land before him so that he will remember this.

And then he looks at Legolas with rain upon his dark lashes and rain in his eyes, utterly unconcerned with the rain in his eyes.

A consummate tenderness possesses Legolas, and he wonders if he would be wise to refuse Aragorn's gaze -- to turn carefree back to this beloved storm instead, as if nothing could touch him.

He doesn’t refuse.

“What beauty,” Aragorn says to him, hushed.

“Mirkwood’s spring storms seem to have accompanied you into the Woodland Realm,” Legolas says with staid grace that betrays nothing. “I thought it only right you become acquainted with them.”

“And intimately,” Aragorn says, finally wiping the rain from his brow as though remembering himself.

The rain beats percussive on leaves that Legolas gathers into a bouquet on their meandering return down to the forest floor. “Should you wish to warm yourself with ash tea,” Legolas suggests.

Glistening with rain, the parade returns to the halls. Their Silvan-colored conversation perhaps sounds raucous to the ears of Aragorn, a child of lofty Imladris. A Ranger caught in a flock of excitable birds.

“He would fare better with wine,” Thranduil says when they step inside, dripping onto smooth stone and hewn wood. The Elven procession rills away down the passageways, sleek and joyous; inside the Elvenking’s meeting room where he bids Legolas and Aragorn follow, his attendants take their waterlogged outerwear and present them warm fur robes. 

“Thank you,” Aragorn says after the attendants, who fill three drinking glasses with Dorwinion wine at Thranduil’s gesture.

Thranduil tosses back his glass and refills it from the brimming jug easily as breathing, tops off Legolas' half-vanished glass. And then he favors Aragorn, standing there bedraggled with the glass over-full in his hand, with a knowing stare. “I am not Lord Elrond,” he assures him. “I will not leap into lecture if I see you enjoying yourself in my hall, Chieftain of the Dúnedain.”

That prompts a small quirk of Aragorn's lips. “Your hospitality humbles me, sire,” he says, taking a drink. His hair drips rainwater into his glass; he almost reels at first swallow of the profoundly intoxicating wine, closing his eyes to the taste.

Legolas sends an appreciative smile to his father, who summarily finishes his second glass, pours himself another, and then sits to finish correspondences. An errant raindrop or two on his hands swirls into the ink, distorting his immaculately scripted Telwar. Not that his father cares a wit, Legolas reckons, given that the letter is addressed to Elrond.

“You are disheveled. Are you cold?” he asks Aragorn, escorting him away from Thranduil’s work.

Aragorn plucks at clothing clinging to him and gathers his fur closer. “Men do not wear rain with such dignity as the Elves do," he says with some levity.

They follow the drifting fire and amber lamplight to Aragorn’s chambers. “I will not be long,” Aragorn promises, shutting the door and rustling about behind it. 

Aragorn's doorframe courses with carved birds roosting in their fruit-laden trees. Spring and summer idylls, a past that is foreign now to Legolas, preserved here and asking to be understood before they are forgotten. 

There is no account yet in Northern Mirkwood’s art of the expressionless, lurking creatures who now inhabit the Realm's corners: hunched, scythe-beaked raptors and aloof black squirrels who refute Legolas’ soft coaxes out of the darkness. He thinks of the strange creatures with untrusting eyes that ask what manner of beast Legolas is to request a single thing of them. 

Who is he to insist on love from a shrinking Woodland home growing unsympathetic to the Elves?

He thinks of fate, that wild force winding through Arda, inscrutable yet omnipresent. It weighs the meandering branches of every Elf's life with offerings of joy and sorrow. To open one’s hands to accept whatever falls into them seems a supreme act of faith. To accept celebration or lamentation -- or both in turns.

Or perhaps to receive nothing at all: perhaps nothing is fated to arrive to him, or any of his dwindling people. Perhaps fate shall be to seek, famished; to strive, lonely. And then to diminish.

Legolas backs away from the door; for planting wayward suppositions in his head. He backs away from what precipice his thinking would have him vault into; he bids his feet return him to his father.

Thranduil intently scrawls away at his letter as Legolas brings himself to balance on the arm of his father’s chair. Silently, he curls himself near to arrange his collection of pale ash leaves into Thranduil's crown, nesting them among the wreath of white flowers. 

One day they will discuss it. The ending. The foreordained collapse of the Elves in Middle-earth, so willed by the Creator, that now swifts toward the last Elven kingdom.

Thranduil perhaps saw the ending closing in long ago, in bloodstained fields where he dragged himself to lie beside his father’s corpse -- dispassionate as the stares of the dead strewn about him.

Now, in this fading Age, Legolas patrols southern Mirkwood's ruins that sit cold as death, waiting on him to sing them back to tenuous life. Cherished relics, Legolas calls them. He is not an Elf who _relinquishes_ : not hope for, nor hold of, Elvendom in Middle-earth. He is not ready yet.

And this is a fate he shares with his father, perhaps: to fight on inexorably, past sense. He cannot remember a time they of the Woodland were not railing against finality. The dread continues sinking through the Realm like a warped root, and they fight. They have ever lived in this besieged fastness.

When Thranduil at last seals his letter and sets it aside, he painstakingly lifts his crown off his head, wincing with the tug on hair and scrape against scalp; he then runs a hand through his damp tresses. The flowers married with Legolas’ leaves hug wetly into the twist of branch. 

Legolas takes the crown promptly from Thranduil's hands, wishing for him to find ease. Thranduil gives him a sidelong stare.

“Find how it rests on your head,” he says.

Legolas fixes him with a wary look. “ _Adar_ , it is yours.”

“For now, my little Silvan,” Thranduil replies evenly, fingers tapping at Legolas’ shoe on the armrest.

Apprehension imbrues Legolas somber. “You are forever our king, and beloved to us,” he insists softly.

“Relieve me of its weight only tonight,” Thranduil changes tack. He remains unruffled as he gestures for Legolas to stand.

Legolas returns his feet to the unimaginative floor. With no excuse to conjure, he examines the crown for a breath before delicately guiding it onto his head.

It rests uneasily there. It snags at his plaits, a distraction dangerous to a hunter and deadly to a warrior.

Feeling ensnared and coltish, Legolas keeps a hand against the crown like an artist modeling his work.

“Hand down,” Thranduil commands, quiet.

Legolas’ hand drifts down to his side.

Thranduil smiles. As still as morning light, he appraises Legolas. He seems content in taking an age to look at him; Legolas manifests his impatience in knit brows and attention that sways from Thranduil to the window, where he watches the drenched night wash away winter's stasis.

“It becomes you,” Thranduil finally states, proudly.

Legolas hums and tips his head hither and thither in experiment. He winces, much akin to his father. It would be vastly preferable to cast the thing aside and find the foxes and owls outside, join their hunt. “It sits painfully,” he says.

Thranduil inclines his head. “Yes,” he agrees, “and ever so it shall.”

And then they both turn to see Aragorn waiting down the hall. Legolas reaches to remove the crown but Thranduil lifts a finger to stay his hand.

“Dúnadan,” he calls to Aragorn. “Will you see to it that Lord Elrond receives my letter?”

“Yes, sire,” Aragorn says, ever courteous and ever looking ahead even as he stands fast as an elm. “Gandalf and I begin the journey to Imladris tomorrow, if his business here is indeed complete.”

Thranduil rises with his wine and drops the letter into the Ranger’s hand.

He turns to Legolas. “Reflect on what you see,” he advises, “and you may find what I find.” He touches Legolas’ cheek, his countenance impassive to keep submerged a sadness Legolas recognizes intimately, as if it were his own. A ferocious sadness from which Thranduil has spent this Third Age protecting Legolas. “My son,” he says, and no more.

Legolas smiles at him for wont of any better salve.

Thranduil calls over an attendant to confer with her, and together they sweep from the room.

Aragorn, with the posture and grace of a Man who has never doubted his own station in life, asks, “Shall we seek a mirror?”

Legolas’ gaze settles on Aragorn. “I would nearly believe my Elven-lord had you in his employ,” he remarks. Aragorn grants him a smile.

Legolas leads him to his chambers, where the oil lamps limn his hair wheat-gold and illuminate the flowers and leaves piercing the crown. He observes all this when he opens his carved bone mirror and peers at himself. His fingers graze the mirror’s case and trace the etched lilies there. He thinks of their softness and how the crown demands softness yield for necessity.

“To become what you see,” Legolas confides to his own reflection, “you must gather what fragments we do yet call ours in Middle-earth, and hold them close ere they vanish. And yet, for all your grasping, they still shall slip away as they wish, swift like the Forest River runs.” 

And he will be left holding shadows.

Aragorn touches tentatively at his elbow and redirects him from the mire in his mind.

Neutrally, Legolas looks toward Aragorn, feeling stiff as though laden not by rainwater, but mud. Aragorn must think it strange that the northeast houses a solitary Elven kingdom. Strange and unpredictable -- out of step. _Silvan_.

But Aragorn seems intent to draw from that deep well in Legolas what he may. “What say you to the crown?” he leads.

Legolas regards himself again. His visage refuses to entirely mimic his king’s as he'd imagined it might; the revelation stokes at the embers of his will. 

He tilts his head in thought and folds the mirror closed. “It catches at my braids,” he answers simply.

“You would likely not wear a warrior’s plaits when the crown is yours,” Aragorn considers, thoughtful despite his flush telling on his tipsiness.

“Yes,” he concedes, pacific but decisive, “as it is not meant to adorn the head of one such as myself. I am only an Elf among his many equals in the Woodland Realm.” And yet, wondering holds him from easing the burden from his head: “And what say you?” he asks Aragorn.

“You look,” Aragorn searches for the word for Legolas, “hallowed.”

Legolas regards him for a moment, conversation overtaken by the rain warring outside. The night grows on, green and black. The smell of thriving roots and softened soil graces them within the halls. 

Then, “Would that my Elven-lord knew what sway this crown holds over you,” he replies blithely.

“What should happen then?” Aragorn asks, a frown swallowed in the next mouthful of Dorwinian wine. He grimaces for its potency, drinks again as though the next would shore up his defenses to it. Legolas almost smiles. 

“I think he would use your fealty to this symbol -- “ (Aragorn gifts him a huff of a laugh) -- “as some bargaining chip with Lord Elrond.” He touches gingerly up at it, as though it would scald him. “What fortune, after all, that the Chieftain of the Dúnedain himself might pledge some interest in our northern kingdom.”

“I am interested,” Aragorn confirms guilelessly. And then, “But what are you interested in, Prince Legolas?”

The question feels uncommonly gracious in its sudden arrival. A thunderstorm's wash.

"Legolas," he corrects Aragorn for the fourth time since they've met.

"Legolas," murmurs Aragorn.

Legolas looks toward the window that frames the primordial night, a smile prologue to his reply. A bright tracery of hope lines his words. “I am dearly interested in hearing more from your journeys to the far reaches East and West,” he says. “I am interested in bearing witness to the Middle-earth of my Age just as you have; in meeting at last the beings and locales I ought know before Age’s end. I should like to wander through the seasons, listening long enough to discover a language hidden in the hollows of trees, or to intuit the meanings of a hitherto-unnoticed small creature's call.” He looks to Aragorn, his gaze intent. “How long I have wandered under the eaves of my mighty forest only guessing the questions our lands wish we would ask ere they are lost forever.”

Aragorn waits on more from him, rapt.

It brings Legolas pause, and he slows his tread along this path lest he go astray. He sips his wine. “But perhaps a Dúnadan finds such hunger for unknowns naïve,” he suggests. “Perhaps you think me an absurd creature for wanting to understand your life until it comes easily to me as arrow’s flight. As it must for you.”

“It does not come so easily to me, no,” Aragorn says, “but it is natural to me.”

“Natural,” Legolas echoes, enjoying the word for its unruly elegance. He finds it in Aragorn’s stubble and lined forehead, the eight strands of silver that Legolas counts in his dark hair. His brown skin bearing stories writ in scars and slow-fading bruises. His smile, quick to appear now with wine’s assist. Natural. Mortal.

Legolas leans idly closer. He wants to sing to Aragorn, or lament his brevity. How fickle Men are, he thinks, that they could be as moving as dawn and resolute as snowfall, only to blink out of existence.

“I would have you ride with me next I seek someplace of interest to you,” Aragorn offers then; it could be his thrall to the wine that encourages him to make such promises. But Legolas stills attentively, and Aragorn, insightful Aragorn, translates this to mean intrigue. “I ought to have invited you sooner. In truth, I had supposed it was you who thought me absurd whenever I would stumble into your great Realm disordered and unsightly,” he laughs around another drink. "We Rangers do not carry ourselves respectably, so long in the wilds."

“Nay, I only relished envisioning you moving across the landscapes,” Legolas says with newfound spirit. But then he closes his mouth to anymore foolish words, for Aragorn slows as he finishes his wine like he has noticed something, and whether it is good or ill he he cannot yet divine.

“A Woodland Elf’s mettle would prove a boon to us weary Rangers,” Aragorn says. “Though alas, that fine crown would only hinder you in the hinterlands.”

Legolas moves to lift the forbidding, blooming encumbrance from his head. “Very well. I release my sway over you, Dúnadan.”

But Aragorn instead begins sinking to a knee with mirth only barely hidden away, looking noble as a legendary accolade woven into tapestry. “You would not accept a Ranger’s fealty?”

“ _Ai_ , do not!” Legolas laughs, abashed, and there is some agony there, too. “Rise, Aragorn! Rise.” He touches his fingers to Aragorn’s chin to draw his gaze up, to draw him back up to his kingly stature. Aragorn obeys his fingers and smiles up at him, drunk and kind, and Legolas' hold on the moment swings away like a tree swallow, already gone. Nigh impossible to track and cage.

So Legolas slips down to his knees to meet Aragorn instead. Perhaps it is thrall to the wine, or Aragorn's disarming face; he is unwise but he is blameless for the smile he returns. “It ails me,” he says. "I should like to return to myself now, with your help."

Aragorn gently reaches to lift the crown from his head. Gently, as though anything in Mirkwood could afford to be so delicate.

The torches cast dancing, rampaging shadow plays across the walls behind Aragorn and steep him with warmth, as though the sun had set in him. The Man’s hands at his skull, Legolas counts those silver strands again, an incantation (eight).

He imagines they could be kneeling together in forsaken Doriath, afield within tales Thranduil is loath to tell him of boyhood spent there. The Elvenking’s silence bestows protection -- and yet the lost, unspoken world wills its memory to manifest here and inhabit the kingdom, spectral.

Aragorn touches at and then extricates some of Legolas’ hair caught in those winding branches. Aragorn’s strife-roughened hands, careful. His palms a mnemonic for wondering -- 

And then Legolas is relieved of the crown and it is set nearby. A part of himself tangled in its intricacies suddenly bounds free.

Like this, he is only an Elf at the ending of the Age of Elves. Disarmed together like this, there is nothing in Legolas a Man would find fearful; nothing in Aragorn an Elf would find lesser.

Aragorn like this gives Legolas a soaring urge to grab that crown and fling it far away across his chambers like a foolish young thing to prove to Aragorn, _We are the same_ \-- 

It would be natural to say here in the fathomless echo of Doriath, _We are the same_. And it would be natural then to –-

Aragorn sits back, cross-legged, looking at him.

“Here I am,” he tells Aragorn with a bright smile.

“There you are,” Aragorn says, as though he has finally found him.

+

That night, for the first time in many years, Legolas thinks of someone. He hopes for someone.

He touches himself, buried in his flax and fur bedding. He presses two fingers inside himself and closes his eyes to the pressure, to the surge of pleasure swimming in him when he slides in deeper. He strokes himself indulgently, relishing _want_.

He does not think about what trouble he sets himself up to stumble into, longing for someone so intricate and good and forbidden to him. 

He wants. He lets want guide him into a snare of his own making.

He presses his face into a soft fur to shun what fate awaits him outside his bed, setting fate to sail down the river, and the river is the blood singing in his ears, vibrant and calling, and the calling is to the hills and fens far from his forest, to unafraid hinterlands where Aragorn has been waiting for him, and Aragorn is so pleased to see Legolas that he kisses him until he is keening, guides him down against the rain-wet earth, and makes love to him.

“You look hallowed,” Aragorn tells him as he enters him deep and devouring, and Legolas grasps at the flowering small plants that carpet the soil beneath him.

“Oh,” Legolas exhales.

Aragorn makes love to him until he is dismantled.

What ruinous power. It makes him tremble. It makes his back arch to sensation and his breathing go heavy. It makes him vulnerable and makes him love to be so.

He keeps his focus on the grey of the Man’s eyes, his scars scrawled across his body, those rough, generous hands. So good. He is so good.

He comes with a muffled sound that Aragorn compels from him. 

Aragorn who is not here but down the corridor, living in another story.

And then he opens his eyes, panting.

And then he stills.

And then he is alone.


	2. wartime stories

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Learning of Men, learning of war, and what war looks like in the province of Men.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Warning: this chapter contains insinuation of rape amid mass violence in the second half of the chapter.)
> 
> Thank you for sticking with this very self-indulgent fic. I really wanted to try exploring the understated but concrete cross-cultural relationship Aragorn (Imladris/Dúnedain) and Legolas (Mirkwood/Elf) have, which means this chapter contains... a variety of contexts, happy and not-happy, for that.
> 
> Mention of Legolas and his fellow Woodland Elves frolicking stark-naked through the forest inspired by "[The Hobbit](https://i.redd.it/2h2upnihta951.jpg)" art by Hans Arnold (1978).

+

In the moments between running, just before running begins again, Legolas finds another world ready to resurrect.

Aragorn and Gimli sit veiled in pipe smoke as they dutifully take rest in a cradle of shrub and boulder, neither of them divesting days of dull tension so easily. The scent of pipe and campfire whisks along the Rohan breeze and holds fast to Legolas’ clothes.

Legolas wanders to and fro within their stakeout, eyes open to movement. The land flushes gold in its eager welcome to the evening. Where he might have anticipated unsavory visitors, he only finds rotund grouses scuttling from bush to burrow, goats rambling along the foothills leagues away, dark swifts springing skyward to rally together. Legolas paces with appreciative eyes upon them.

Until Gimli eventually reminds him that mere Mortals tend to become a tad unnerved when they must play captive audience to an Elf’s incessant fidgeting. Aragorn flicks Gimli and then offers him more pipeweed.

Legolas blithely turns on his heel and takes his leave, roaming down their knoll. Escaped from the smoke, he breathes in the late daytime. The rocks and reeds ripple mildly with cold, preoccupied in their wait for warmer days. Grasses steeple their gentle arms up in prayer beneath his feet. A runnel shimmering in the waning daylight beckons Legolas; he toes off his shoes, hikes up his trousers, and wades into the waters.

Knee-deep in the glacial cold, he strokes his hand through the current to feel its resistance and watches the sheen of water between his legs. Singing to himself, he stills where he stands, gazing at the light dancing upon the water as though he would fall into reverie admiring it -- such an ancient bright that a Woodland Elf would have thought it already lost to the Ages. But within this lonely moment, it revives. 

The bright speaks. The sound is only sound now, but it meant something holy once.

He sings back down to the water, an old Silvan lullaby to soften the current to him. His hand floats upward, brushing past his hair to where he stows a long knife.

Then, sharp and clean, he pitches forward and plunges his knife into the water. It emerges with a middling trout pierced and thrashing on the blade until it wanes and goes limp.

"Thank you for your life," Legolas murmurs to the gleaming creature.

This land of Men is suffused with long sufferings, and apprehension of still greater pain. Yet when he attunes himself to the foreign scapes, Legolas witnesses a land thriving doggedly, as though it would summon hope for the next day, and then the next. 

And each day provides -- natural as fate, unknown as fate. It is only a matter of opening one’s hands and finding what has arrived: frightful joy and frightful sorrow in turns. Or the bittersweet of nothing.

Today, Legolas finds in his hands mild waters and food to offer two people he loves fiercely.

The breeze tugs at his hair; he looks up to find Aragorn. He had heard the Man approach and then slow as if he had chanced upon something secret. At a distance from Legolas, Aragorn smiles at him; Legolas marks it as Aragorn’s first smile of the day, a day nearly past. 

“You will have to teach me sometime,” Aragorn calls.

“One afternoon is all I need. We shall fashion you into a Silvan yet, Estel,” Legolas responds easily.

Aragorn gathers Legolas’ shoes and meets him at the bank to set them down for him. “High expectations indeed,” he remarks. Then, “But we can hope.” 

Legolas waves the fish up at Gimli, who lords over them from his vantage point on the hillock. He makes a triumphant gesture at Legolas and stoops to feed their fire deadwood. The flame’s ambrosial colors glow on his beard and Legolas thinks of a simple poem in Sindarin he must teach Gimli when they have time for such play.

The nascent night rejuvenates the treeless exhaustion of this kingdom of Men; the anticipation of another day bearing another warm word or small achievement buoys Legolas’ spirits. 

He calls this joy enough to tide him through any sorrow.

+

Aragorn is adept at fishing already, as expected. He is adept at a good many things: wielding sword and bow alike; reciting lore and history; speaking Sindarin and some Quenya and the Haradrim speech and a smattering of dialects that, at their insistence, he regaled Legolas and Gimli with once; tracking creatures great and small; foraging medicinal plants; leading.

It’s not to say Aragorn is perfect. Aragorn is not adept at sharing his burdens, retreating instead into thought while shouldering one disquiet upon the other until he is staggering under the weight; Aragorn is too humble; Aragorn smokes too much; Aragorn should wash his hair more often; Aragorn leaps to condemn himself for every stroke of ill fortune.

Legolas wonders, when their eyes lock over collecting fallen arrows or amid conferring on directions, what Aragorn might say about him -- what he appreciates in Legolas, what he would change. 

What Aragorn might say to him -- if he did not spend many of his fleeting hours cutting a lonely figure knelt within the long grass or standing just further on, and leaving Legolas wondering after him. _When you go, where is it you go?_

+

While in the daylight he and Gimli venture arm-in-arm as Aragorn’s allegiant companions, affirming their bond through a tide of conversation and shared deed, it is under night’s cover he and Aragorn tend the growing plot of their shared tale. 

Aragorn was never so adept at sleeping, after all.

While Legolas watches the dark hours unfurl, humming to the dim starlight, his attention alights on Aragorn: Aragorn folding his arms with eyes screwed resolutely shut, then curling into himself like a timid fawn.

Legolas approaches soundlessly, canting down with the quickness of a cattail to draw Aragorn's threadbare blanket over his shoulders.

Aragorn opens his eyes to Legolas. He looks wan in the moonlight.

"You are uneasy," Legolas observes, hushed. 

An apparition of mirth flits across Aragorn’s face, some private thought about Elven statements of the obvious; he keeps it to himself. Instead, he rises blearily to find Gimli and listen for his stormy snoring before easing back against the earth. "Yes."

"The nights are wintry yet," Legolas says. "Take my blanket. I am glad of the frost and will wish to lie against it."

“Do not trouble yourself on my account, Legolas,” Aragorn murmurs, his head dropping grassward.

Legolas crouches near, keeping his focus neatly halved between the night and Aragorn’s rumpled form. “What comfort may I give you?”

Aragorn’s brows knit as he looks up at Legolas. “No. No. I have no wishes,” a lie but a gracious one, “only words.” He offers Legolas a self-abasing smile. “They keep me awake.” 

At length and at Legolas’ staid presence, Aragorn draws a breath of the chilled air, holds it in to yield to the symphony of crickets playing to them. Then, "These days spent hunting with no sign we shall find success, I cannot but wonder if without Gandalf’s counsel I have," Aragorn pauses, turning again to stare up at the starred firmament with its drowsy clouds, "led us astray. All I know is to run -- do we run too swiftly or too slowly, I cannot say. Any portents good or ill have gone missing." He shakes his head, wonderingly. "As though fate has abandoned me though I pursue it. And with naught but my own wit left to direct me through this undertaking -- this War -- what certainties I have let guide me lifelong drop away. What I find in their stead are questions.”

Legolas remains housed in his silence until Aragorn forgoes watching the heavens for watching Legolas. Aragorn is waiting on him to speak, wolf-keen gaze splitting the dark. "I am unused to giving advice," Legolas finally admits.

"I understand that of the Elves," Aragorn responds, smile and voice distant as though from the far riverbank.

Legolas lowers himself down, propped on his elbows to retain both the scenery and Aragorn in his sights.

"I ask myself what worth is a healer when he fails in aiding those who had placed faith in him." Legolas shifts in disagreement, listing closer to Aragorn. Aragorn recognizes this and continues before Legolas can interject, "And I look toward Gondor’s fractured lands of old, and ask myself if Gondor’s future king is bound to lay a bloody claim upon Arnor and thus protract Middle-earth’s strife, when the Chieftain I was only last season did believe he could wage diplomacy with those Men. In this Age, is every language but that of war moribund?” 

He reaches for his waterskin and lets his hand rest upon it as if to seek reassurance in its weathered physicality. Legolas places his hand atop Aragorn’s, unwilling to see Aragorn bereft of warmth in the night's freeze. Physical affection comforts Men, Legolas knows, in the same way it comforts Elves -- though it is a guarded, powerful expression among Legolas’ kin, not to be recklessly gifted.

But Aragorn eases at the touch, and it is enough for Legolas to forgo his tendril-light grip to hold firm.

"I look to Gimli," Aragorn murmurs, "and I ask questions. Would I show such mettle as he, were I not beholden to courage by my lot in life? I look to you." His voice falls somewhere fathomless. "I ask questions."

An owl’s call fills the time Legolas spends waiting on elaboration from Aragorn; it never arrives. 

"I do not think there exists a script in any domain we could find and follow through this mighty chase, though we may dearly wish it," Legolas whispers. "We sprint instead through the uncertain realm of hawks, boars, and deer, far afield from all counsel and foresight we once had."

Aragorn blinks away fatigue, and the ponderous lineage and legend foisted upon him. 

"We were promised no map by fate’s machinations; we only promised each other we would run. Indeed, any messages scratched across these lands shall be only those we leave in our wake." Legolas' hand tightens just so over Aragorn’s. “But it is good, Aragorn. Here and now, we are untangled. There is naught but what we do, and who we choose to be."

"And therein perhaps is fate," Aragorn reaches his conclusion carefully.

"Yes! There it stalks us. And we are freer for being its prey; we shall only know it in hindsight, when we journey far enough that we may turn to reflect upon what is past."

“Yes,” Aragorn echoes, wandering in a faraway thought. And then, nearer: “Admirable is your philosophy, Legolas.”

“I find clarity giving chase by your side,” Legolas says. Aragorn looks at him, the night birds singing over his silence. 

Legolas follows their path as their silhouettes blink across -- “Menelvagor,” Legolas observes, pointing up to the constellation. He imbibes the refreshed air in lieu of singing a hymn at Gimli’s expense. “Our fierce and generous guardian. How he heartens me.”

“It is the representation of Túrin Turambar, as I know it,” Aragorn says, brushing away the hair fallen in his eyes and blinking up at the scintillating glow.

Legolas considers the sky’s primordial light before turning to Aragorn.

“But,” Aragorn sucks in a breath gently through his teeth, “it brings bad luck to a Ranger who searches out Túrin’s image in the heavens and then invokes his name -- so say the superstitious among us.”

Legolas smiles at the thought of seasoned Dúnedain sighting the constellation and studiously fixing their gaze elsewhere, speaking of anything else. “A harbinger of loss,” he guesses.

Aragorn glances at Legolas and nods. “Bitter ends,” he adds.

“Are you a superstitious Ranger?” Legolas asks, unshy.

Aragorn weighs the question. “I,” he begins, and then cocks his head at the sky -- “avoid dwelling on the tragedy of Túrin.”

“Do you? I dearly like to dwell on his image. It is solace to me,” Legolas shares, sanguine. “In days past, I and my folk would patrol the Realm for fell creatures deep into the abyssal night. Every so often we glimpsed Menelvagor’s ascent into the sky through the heavy canopy. At such a time, we would swiftly disarm ourselves, disrobe, and dash free through the trees to anyplace we could behold the guardian above, uninhibited.”

Aragorn has raised his eyebrows. Prim Imladris upbringing.

“And when we would chance upon a clearing somewhere in the depth of forest, we would press ourselves against its floor.” 

He unslings his quiver and bow and falls back against the giving soil, arms open, vulnerable under the night. Like this, says the soft exhilaration in his sigh when he looks again to the stars. 

“And then we would listen as our breathing mingled with the hum of the ancient earth, just as the first Elves so did upon awakening at Cuiviénen -- just as they were unarrayed but for the primeval gaze of the stars upon their skin. And knowing nothing, nothing but deep love at first sight of their celestial guardian. Menelvagor.” Legolas smiles, naming the figure: “Túrin.”

Legolas returns his attention to the ground to find how strange the Man thinks him now, to find a faint brightness gaining in Aragorn’s face. “Your words stir me,” Aragorn says.

A well of tender silence fills between them.

Then Legolas gathers his quiver and bow close, returned to vigilance as he remembers why they have come to be together. “You have my and Gimli’s love, Aragorn,” he tells him. “Be never afraid to stumble. We will ever be here to catch you.”

Aragorn reaches to hold fast again to Legolas’ hand and Legolas sits up. His palm is hard, cold. Legolas feels warmth. “And you both have my love,” he returns. “Fearless, dear Legolas.”

Legolas laughs, a puff of air curving into icy white. “Alas, you must know I have of late become acquainted with fear, in these mysterious locales.”

“Does this world beyond the Wood -- “

“Go to sleep, Aragorn,” Gimli suddenly grunts across the charred remains of their fire.

Aragorn halts mid-speech and offers Legolas a smile, contrite. He rolls onto his side to try at rest again.

Legolas hops up to find his blanket and drape it upon Aragorn. He nestles into it, under-eyes shadowed with weariness. “Thank you,” he murmurs.

Legolas slips toward Gimli to touch his arm in apology. He earns another grunt.

The night mists collect into crystalline frost on the grass, interrupted only by the owls who command the breezes hither and yon. They till the soil with great talons and harvest the mice; the mice go still, in awe at their sudden ascent into the sky. 

The freedom of prey, to never know until fate has already happened to them.

Legolas settles his Galadhrim bow, striking as snow dusting a fir, beside himself.

Fearless, dear Legolas. The hunter who will not relinquish.

Legolas smiles gratefully up to Menelvagor. Fearless, dear Legolas. Then the smile dims on his face.

He asks when it happened that his own imagination began to frighten him.

+

Aragorn notices the weight of absence well before they press onward, down the declination to the scattered, dilapidated homes sitting on Rohan’s easterly fringe. Absence glares here. "I had expected we might chance upon a homesteader by now," he mentions as they begin their descent to the listless strath below. “So much the better,” he considers, “if we may pass through unseen.”

“There is a settlement in the dale,” Legolas remarks, taking a long look at small homes and wasted plots of dirt westward, “but no more than a few mean homes. I see four Men busy with livestock.” He tilts his head at the forsaken land. “No others remain here, it seems.”

Gimli stumbles once, twice as they follow a steep, root-ridged slope. Legolas turns to face him. “Take my hands and I will help you,” he encourages the Dwarf, pacing backward expertly with palms open to him.

Gimli struggles between grudging gratitude and galled distaste. “You need not, lad,” he mutters.

“Aye, I know it well as you do,” Legolas concedes, “but I want to.”

Aragorn gives them an appreciative look, tidily tucking his loneliness under noble resignation; Legolas is awake to this, and meets Aragorn’s eyes to coax him into the comfort of friendship. “Though our mighty Aragorn would carry you on his back with cheer, if you prefer.”

Aragorn conceals his smile under stern expectation. “Well, Gimli?”

Gimli puffs a long-suffering sigh, grasps Legolas’ hands, and they descend together over boulder and slick dirt.

Legolas keeps his placid smile even as, descending into the hollow of valley, the atmosphere begins to assail him in warning. And then the waft of death -- new death. Aragorn picks up his patient pace to meet an unknown crisis. The three are no strangers to bouts of terrible danger, so familiar with the warrior’s way they are almost affectionate to it -- slaying before slain, orc heads messily hewn and rolling like overripe fruit across the unyielding earth. Legolas swallows, asking what crisis has befallen the land that it would leave him unsettled so. He slips once on the way down, and Gimli quiets his complaints to scrutinize Legolas.

The crisis is that there is no crisis. The indomitable slope evens into repetitious flowing grassland once more. There is one Man far down the expansive valley, weathered and suspicious to Legolas’ eyes -- and then three more, youthful Men bearing no joy, out with a goat and chickens; they clutch rattling old weapons close as though they are the last worldly possessions left to them. Upon noticing Aragorn at the fore, the Men begin a brisk approach.

Legolas and Gimli stop, motionless and aware as birds before flight when Aragorn glances back to give them both a hard look. “Hood, Legolas,” he instructs in a tone leaving no room for question; Legolas tugs his cloak’s hood over his head. 

Aragorn then goes to meet the Men with a traveler’s humility arraying him; his unhurried gait and empty hand raised in greeting speak of no harm meant. He could be any errant fool, just like this band of unkempt Men.

The crisis is that the truth of the crisis is buried now. Legolas’ stomach twists and he breathes through his mouth to keep out the faint miasma of death; its source, he realizes, lies only just down the stripped meadow. The yet-unthawed ground masks the worst of it.

The Men harbor hostility; Legolas discovers it in their unsettled eyes and their sparing speech bred from it -- _the Shadow moves at night, seen it themselves, the Shadow cleared the land of all folk out here, they’re all gone to the hills and further on for fear of what’s coming, you won’t find what you look for here._ Then they turn their dour faces to notice Legolas and the way he reads them.

The Men stare. They stare around Aragorn and their cagey conversation swims away -- they have never seen an Elf before. They nakedly wear their sentiments on their faces: cowed wonderment, lust, distrust. Swiftly, these prosaic reactions degenerate together into the same hate. They hate Legolas.

“Come here, beauty,” calls one of them with no sweetness in his voice.

Aragorn grabs the Man’s shoulder, pretense vanished. Gimli grabs Legolas’ elbow. “Come away,” he says, “turn away.”

Aragorn is intercepting their distraction with exacting questions now, but Legolas stops listening as his psyche, screaming at him to flee this place, shows him the source of the darkness, the Shadow. “They killed,” he tells Gimli. “There were others living and hale in this dale, and they killed them. Innocents. I find no sign of battle upon these Men. Naught but cruelty upon them.”

“How many dead?” Gimli asks, sagaciously working at constructing a complete picture even as he seizes at his axe. “Where?”

“I cannot say,” Legolas murmurs, unanchored. He glances back at the Men; they stand with the posture of the dehumanized: they are beyond guilt. They’ve embraced monstrosity’s grip. “They,” Legolas breathes, tossing back his hood to feel the air, needing air, stretching his index finger toward that patch of land, “buried their victims there.”

It happens as in a whirlwind: the Men catch the shine of Legolas’ hair, and then follow his direction -- and suddenly they spring forth against Aragorn. Aragorn spares one glance back before raucous shouting and beastly shoving commence, and Aragorn too begins shouting, asking what they have done under guise of fear. All merely words, useless.

Legolas strides to the patch of misery before he can be kept. A petticoat, simple linen painstakingly stitched, hangs tangled through a bush with the smell of blood laced through its make. The dirt here is brittle, disturbed by the quick catastrophe.

A mass grave for Mortal Men. 

How many? Perhaps a handful interred, small in size and new to death, sinking still into their slovenly beds. Legolas peers closer, dizzily.

He finds in the hasty burial of the murdered that fingers, a woman’s thin fingers beringed with silver, are sprouting back up through the earth like a nightmarish plant.

His hand flies to clutch at his chest. He hears Gimli hurrying over, nervous and exasperated at sight of a dramatic Elven gesture.

Legolas turns away and closes his eyes -- then his eyes fly open. No, he must bear witness to her; he returns his gaze to the young woman underground. “You are known. May peace hold you,” he whispers, merely words.

Gimli skids to a halt beside him and together they watch her without a sound.

Aragorn swifts toward Legolas and Gimli, takes one look, and then turns back to the Men with a flame flaring at his heels, the conflagration of war on his face.

A couple of the hardened Men melt like snow to his fire, scrambling away in the direction of the mountains; two viciously set upon Aragorn with shouts, brandishing rusted knife and gnarled hands. A fist collides with Aragorn’s cheek, then another. The sound of ice screaming against stone as a blade unsheathes.

Gimli runs toward Aragorn with his axe raised, swearing in Khuzdul.

Aragorn disarms one with brute force -- a shove, an elbow, and his blade burning against the weak sunlight.

Fewer than ten lie here. Smaller figures than the square-backed Men of furthest Rohan, that they may fit within this constricted, abandoned garden; women, he thinks, and children. He sways to sit, touching his fingers to the freezing soil. 

Aragorn smashes his knee against the face of a murderer who screams, nose exploding into blood; he vacillates wildly between clutching his face and raising his hands to tremulously petition the Dúnadan. Aragorn's fist in murderer’s hair -- tearing at hair, teeth bared. Aragorn’s voice reawakening the dead air -- commanding so the very walls of the abandoned valley behold him, “If the tongue of the sword is the only speech you heed now, my final word to you shall be brief.” 

Legolas tears his gaze away for a moment to watch Aragorn, unable to deny the future king of Gondor.

“No, no, no,” wails his captive, cowering before Aragorn while Gimli keeps his axe’s thirsting edge to the other one’s neck, “release us, we will not -- “

“If brutality is all you bear now -- “ Aragorn is seething, bruise blooming across his cheek and eye, and yet utterly untouchable; Legolas shivers, which is when Gimli’s captive begins swinging his sword in a wide, mad arc toward Aragorn. 

Legolas instinctively draws his bow and lets his arrow fly into the Man’s shoulder. The Man howls. Gimli tackles him. The murderers struggle. 

Legolas reads the stagnant panic in the soil. 

The settlement upended with pallid, Manmade fear. The Men kill loved ones, neighbors; they violate. Indiscriminately. They are heady with nihilistic fervor. And when their urges have been sated and none are left to terrorize, they adorn themselves again with composure and pretend at decency. 

They may even try at shedding a tear over loss.

But compassion has forsaken the valley; here, there is only the Shadow, for it is already housed in the hearts of Men. It has always been here, waiting for Men to will themselves into monsters.

One of the murderers lunges in his bid to destroy Aragorn, boots squealing against the soil. Then resounds a crack like a falling tree, and he abruptly goes quiet with a thud against the dispassionate grass. Aragorn has stilled him with a sword hilt slammed to his head.

Legolas inhales, numbly listening for signs of life in the Man who has killed -- but Aragorn is careful in his violence. The Man sluggishly drags himself a pace before he goes dormant where he lies.

The last one in their quarter wildly wrenches at the arrow piercing his shoulder, bloodily digs away at it as though he would strike out his missteps; he wags his head with wild eyes and then curls into himself much as Aragorn did in last night’s benevolent dark. “Mercy,” he screams, “Your fellow Man, look upon your fellow Man with -- “

Gimli follows Aragorn’s lead, axe’s hilt to temple, and the Man flattens, unconscious. Breathing yet and for some years to come. Enough blood has besmirched the grass.

A heated grief leaves Legolas hurt by the Men’s good fortune, by Aragorn’s mercy. He watches the ravaged earth, province of the dead, thinking of brevity and how fickle, how fickle --

“The Men here would submit to fear alone now,” Aragorn announces, stoic. Gimli swipes a hand across his eyes as though to rid himself of the scene. 

“We will remain watchful as we approach deeper Riddermark. We may encounter more of the same mind as the likes of these.” He looks to Legolas. “Keep your hood over next time. We need not have finished here with only unanswered questions to show.”

Legolas stares up at him, wishing to be indignant but too unmoored within the scene to feel stricken by Aragorn’s frustration. “You had already a thought,” he realizes, “that an atrocity of this ilk had occurred. You knew they were capable of such things.”

Aragorn inclines his head, taciturn -- _yes_. Experienced with horror -- horror being natural company throughout a Ranger’s lonely life.

 _Natural_ , said Aragorn that night in Mirkwood, heralded in by the heaving torrents.

He sheathes his blade with a trenchant slide and click -- with an unholy power retained in him to command and ruin whomever he chooses, just as these Men have. 

Legolas blinks his gaze back down.

They hold an abbreviated vigil: Gimli sturdy through sorrow, Aragorn unflinching through pain.

Finally, Gimli sighs long, eyes on the shadows spindling away from their feet. He seeks relief from the valley’s tension, but no peace proffers itself to the Dwarf. “We need to keep moving.” He pats a hand to Aragorn’s back. “The further we make it, the better. I reckon those others who fled will not be far off.”

“Their own families,” Legolas says, merely words, words for the wordless, “and then the families of others, they violated and destroyed -- .” He remains where he has sunk, caught doe-like in the net of cruelty.

“We’d best move on. Come now,” Gimli pushes again.

“Clear of the fens where they wallow yet,” Legolas requests, “else I shall not stay my hand against them.”

They walk on past the few homes bereft of life. The walls speak to Legolas of existence in tandem with seasons’ change. Clear winds, and children’s voices coloring them. They sing; how do they sing? Their tongue is lost on him, though they beseech him to listen. 

And then Mortal Men’s cruelty -- explosive evil that singes the emptied dwellings.

The Shadow moves at night, they said. But the Shadow languishes here and now, in plain daylight.

The three splash across a meek rill devoid of life. They don’t speak. They keep close to one another; the warmth of companionship feels at once kind and malicious. 

Legolas dashes at a tear in the corner of his eye with a knuckle; another arrives all too soon.

“Legolas.” Aragorn speaks his name so softly, and something of his father’s defiance surges in him. 

Because it could bring him to ruin, the way Aragorn invokes his name here in terror’s kingdom, how close he feels to Aragorn in the pandemonium, how effortlessly Aragorn could reach into him right now and take whatever he wanted -- because it frightens him how easily a Mortal Man could undo him with only a word, make him forget himself, how ruinous Aragorn is to compel him closer still -- 

and that is what Legolas wants.

“Men are monstrous,” Legolas bites out.

A scuff of Dwarven sole on the dirt insinuates Gimli badly wants to scold him, _Would you find some_ tact _, Elf --_

“Yes,” Aragorn says. His voice, tight, betrays his measured gaze upon the meadow ahead. “Men are quick to descend so in times when the veil is lifted and they discover the limits of their power.” 

He then blinks carefully, as if needing to consider it before he lets himself. “We would do the unthinkable to restore the illusion.”

+

Motion, unceasing, guides the day toward evening; it delivers them from the wretched smell of death and spirits them out of the valley to lush, tall grasses unbent to fear. And, a favor to an Elf whose steps flag under the weight of sorrow, it intimates Rohan’s coming spring with a fresh drizzle of rain.

Gimli abhors rain; he begins piling deadwood into his arms well before Aragorn calls a halt for rest. 

Aragorn only calls a halt when he turns to find he must wait on Legolas to meet their pace. 

Legolas dips his head to watch the rippling verdure against his ankles, face a mirror of the grasses’ tranquility. He confidently claims a secluded, stony enclave for their rest.

Half-hidden from the rain, Aragorn begins to reach for his pipe, then touches at his waterskin, and then gives up and drops his empty hand to his side; he instead prudently circles their place of respite before walking further on to examine animal tracks. He doesn’t once touch at the bruise deepening its color across his face; one more ache, he bears it with sure posture. Untouchable. 

Rohirrim have long since passed through these desolate reaches, but rain muddles any other meanings that may have been stamped into the earth. The signs have gone missing. And Aragorn --

“I will go and find you more kindling,” Legolas declares to Gimli.

Gimli makes a face, suspicious. “Why not try at getting yourself some rest like everyone else in the wide world does,” he suggests.

“The rain drifting upon the land bolsters my strength and my will,” Legolas reasons, “and my will is to find you more kindling.”

“Well, it is a fine use of your time if you refuse respite, yes,” Gimli concedes, “but do not say I gave my blessing to your hare-brained schemes. When you finally collapse into slumber mid-step, no guilt will cajole me into dragging you hither-thither.”

“Call the kindling a gift, then, and be blameless,” Legolas excuses Gimli with a smile, needing movement and wind. Gimli pats Legolas’ hand, leaning brusquely back against the rock face to disguise his concern.

Legolas’ feet take him away to a patch of woody blackberry bramble, weathered and past bearing, which he breaks away at and pulls delicately into his arms as though he would tame some thorny, wild creature.

His feet then take him to Aragorn, who kneels far away in familiar solitude. He is returned to being the Ranger, his brown hands brushing against matted leaves to translate their positions into some narrative of forsaken pasture.

 _We are the same_ , Legolas wants to tell Aragorn, knowing Aragorn reads therein a story of condemnation: condemnation of Man, of himself. No soft word to pillow the future king of Men's head.

Men are hurried in their cruelty, yes. 

Elves are slow, taking their time to inflict unhealing lacerations upon the Ages.

With his toe, Legolas snaps a twig to announce his arrival. Aragorn turns. “Here will do for taking rest,” he assesses. “So long as Gimli’s fire does not burn so inviting to -- “

Legolas touches his fingers to Aragorn’s chin to draw his gaze up, draw him back up to his kingly stature. This second time in their lives requesting Aragorn’s obeisance, Aragorn rises immediately as if under an enchantment. He absently wipes mud from his hands, his silence hinged upon Legolas’. 

It would be natural to simply continue gazing at Aragorn, defiant of the passage of time and the evolving clouds above their heads. 

But standing at the advent of the Age of Men, the hour is a current that coaxes Legolas forth and so he does as hurried Men do, cradling his blackberry kindling in one arm and sliding his other around Aragorn. He embraces him, fingers curling around a rain-damp shoulder. 

Aragorn pulls Legolas close, weight pressing against Legolas immediately as the reeds slanting with the breeze. Legolas forgoes his misgivings, his hand smoothing at the jut of Aragorn’s shoulder blade and moving to cradle the back of Aragorn’s neck, as if to gather him back together.

Time hounds them, furiously. 

When time hounds Mortal Men, in answer they hurry in their merciless felling of others. They hurry to see their victims fall in agony -- of death or love.

Aragorn hurries as is Mortal Men’s wont, separates from Legolas after that brief hold. His stubble rasps an insistent sigh against Legolas’ cheek just before their eyes meet again. Legolas’ blackberry canes dig into Aragorn’s unarmored side and Aragorn looks like he would wince if he were not intently searching Legolas’ face as he prepares to speak. His face reads contrite under that darkening bruise: he means to apologize, to condemn himself.

Legolas absolves Aragorn with a kiss, brief as the moment instructs, to the corner of Aragorn’s lips.

It is chaste -- despite the way Aragorn leans in after him as soon as he parts, foreheads pressing, noses brushing, Aragorn’s arm at his waist.

It is chaste despite the way Legolas’ eyelashes flutter, a tell of anticipating some nameless thing, before he touches gingerly at the hurt on Aragorn’s face.

It is chaste despite the way Legolas wishes to relinquish himself to Aragorn’s hand when it takes Legolas’ and presses it to his chest, where Legolas can feel the steady time his Mortal heart keeps. 

_Oh,_ thinks Legolas. _Ruin._

It is chaste.

A pheasant rifles through brush, fading into the cobalt dusk; Gimli remains unsighted but the heavy fragrance of pipe smoke reaches them. Legolas thinks of the petticoat tangled in the brush, of brevity. His fingers pluck along the blackberry wood he holds fast, grateful for the thorned bramble warding off impulse. 

Aragorn finds Legolas’ eyes again; he seems resolved now, surety in his rooted stance. His hand tightens over Legolas’. “What comfort may I give you?” he echoes Legolas.

Legolas begins to pull away. 

“Let me,” Aragorn says. “Legolas. My dearest friend.”

Legolas considers this, long by the measure of Man, though Aragorn is not any Man. At last he asks, “How does one bid farewell in Rohirric?”

Aragorn tells him. Legolas repeats, closes his eyes, repeats again. Falls silent to listen to its wake.

After staying in the quiet with Legolas, Aragorn says, “I have heard the young sing in Rohan, near as I can interpret, of a regal giantess who awakens every spring from her bed upon the mountain ridge. Climbing down from the peaks, she bears gifts of tame birds and fruit for children. Perhaps here, too, in the far reaches of this land, the young would know it. Perhaps they sang it here upon these very meadows, before.”

It is a beautiful thought to find home inside: a young woman’s fortress of mountain and bird and legend -- not the cold, starless underworld where no light or sound may enter. 

Legolas bows his head in lament for everything unhealed. He doesn’t hide his tears when his focus fogs. The fog never lifts in wartime. 

Sight fails; sound suffices.

“Teach me how to sing it,” Legolas says.


	3. the foxes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finding a duplicate world on the doorstep of the Dead.

Gimli talks of love sometimes. Aragorn talks of Túrin and Beleg sometimes. 

Gimli talks of love sometimes, unaware that Aragorn still reckons with the loss of love, because Aragorn asked his betrothed to cross to Elvenhome. The Dwarf develops a fascination with Elvish love poetry; between the wretched bloodletting at Helm’s Deep and their fraught waiting to ride on to Gondor, Gimli has grown both fatalistic and romantic. 

It moves Legolas to smile the Dwarf’s way ever more warmly, to listen to his stories more carefully, and to refrain from rubbing at his ribs after riding with Gimli digging armored arms into his sides. 

Gimli thinks the three of them are going to die. 

Gimli thinks Legolas will die first, then he himself, and then finally -- valiantly -- Aragorn.

Aragorn is an optimist: he thinks he alone will die.

Just before Theoden King and his faithful, fearful Men answer the beacon’s call to their fate in Gondor, while the birds sing warfare’s chaos to silence, Gimli asks Legolas to teach him a pithy Sindarin poem, that he may hold to the hope he will someday present it to someone.

Doesn’t matter who, Gimli says, ignoring Legolas’ knowing look.

“Elves do not write ‘pithy’ poetry,” Legolas intones with a playful gravity.

“Of course -- well -- something,” Gimli claws at the air in embarrassed futility, “shorter than the span of a night, then.”

Gimli asks about Elves and love. He asks how Legolas would go about it if he were in love. Legolas strokes at the fletching on an arrow and follows the journey of a ringed snake; it slithers from the cracks in Edoras’ crumbling stone and slinks into the bushes to seek its prey. 

Gimli gives up waiting on him and returns to practicing Sindarin under his breath.

“Love has already happened to me,” Legolas suddenly tells Gimli, owing him sincerity. “And I have naught to show for it. I am a poor model for the likes of you, Gimli.”

“Well,” Gimli reasons, working through what he can infer in the mud of Elven melancholia, “it happened all the same, didn’t it, and so -- so, what are you saying ‘happened’ with love, now?”

“Love is far away in another tale not my own,” Legolas answers.

“Maybe because the narrative is more straightforward over there,” Gimli mutters.

Legolas laughs and relates another line of poetry to the Dwarf.

There is no narrative in this story Legolas could follow that ends in love. The hope of, the possession of, the consummation of. Legolas is not wise, but Legolas is not a fool. 

Wants are only wants in Middle-earth, the domain of strife.

With empty hands, Legolas instead plucks arrows from fallen orcs, rebraids his tousled hair after each gorey brawl, takes Aragorn’s hand when Aragorn reads troubled, strokes Arod’s white velvet nose as he murmurs praise to him.

He calls these the rewards of having remained alive so late in this dying Age, in this War.

+

This evening, Theoden finds a moment, amid aggrieved discussions on killing and being killed, to grant Legolas permission to take a few of the evening’s eggs from his kitchen’s chicken coop. “You Elves and your self-reliance,” he marvels. He has seen the little fire Legolas occasionally tends for himself in the scrubby greensward, when the smell and dinge of Meduseld becomes too oppressive for him. “What admirable company Aragorn keeps.”

Aragorn keeps Legolas’ company less often now. He keeps Legolas’ company only in the moments when the Mortal machinations of Theoden or Éomer or the ruddy-faced Rohirrim calm, treating him to a deep breath before the next plunge.

He finds Legolas less often now. He finds Legolas in Meduseld’s musty gloom, sometimes only for the moment it takes to flash a relieved smile and close a hand on the Elf’s arm. Sometimes it is only to dryly comment on Theoden’s temperament this hour.

Once, maybe a day or a lifetime ago, Aragorn had caught sight of Legolas’ hair shining with a window’s thin light, and broke away to update the Elf on the prevailing politics of the afternoon. Then he had admitted with the same harried resignation of the stabled horses in their wait for pasture, “How fondly already I think back on our time together, though hardly a month gone -- we Three Hunters in the wilds, with only our footsteps to answer for.” He had smiled: “Even as we did without the luxury of Edoras’ beds, how fondly I recall our time.” 

Legolas had sent him a smile just as sweet, and turned his gaze out beyond the wooden window shutters to witness the cold, bright earth. He had cheerily commented something about sacrificing one good for another. It hardly matters what he said; while he spoke he had felt Aragorn’s gaze upon him, intent as a hand against the nape of his neck. Seeking.

Sometimes Legolas is singing to the horses in the dawn, just before sunrise, while he brushes Arod in his stall, and Aragorn joins him -- only a warm voice outside the stable door and a glimpse of dark hair that vanishes nearly as soon as seen. 

A Rohir nearby inevitably approaches Aragorn to share words of encouragement or woe. 

Aragorn halts his singing. 

And Legolas watches the vast, empty doorway long after the brief figure and dulcet conversation have trailed away toward Meduseld -- until Arod or his neighbor snorts and nudges at Legolas’ shoulder to implore him, _Sing, keep singing_. 

Sometimes Gimli stomps up to Legolas and remarks, “Aragorn was just looking for you.” 

But it’s too late. Everything is too late and too brief in Middle-earth, domain of strife.

By dusk’s preternatural light, Legolas sparingly collects two eggs from the chicken coop into his cloak’s pocket, one each for him and Gimli. And then there appears Aragorn: closing the gate to the pen, illumed by torchlight leaking from the kitchen windows, surrounded by hens scratching dust onto his boots. 

The interminable cacophony of horse and Man through the streets filters into a whisper. The chickens’ contented murmuring graces the evening.

“There you are,” Aragorn says.

“Here I am,” he smiles.

“Anything for me?” Aragorn asks in jest, prompting a laugh from Legolas.

“What would you have?” he wonders.

“Some clue as to how you keep these hens so agreeable as they’re parted from their eggs.”

“I asked them first,” Legolas dismisses lightly as a leaf. He adds one more egg to his cloak. Aragorn intuits the invitation and steps near; he bends to touch at a chicken, who viciously pecks his knuckles.

“These Men are fraying where they stand as they wait on Theoden King’s word. It gnaws away at them,” he tells Legolas. “Still they wait, courageous as from a tale of old -- but they are certain their destruction is nigh.”

“And you?” Legolas asks, keeping his expression mild.

“The Age of Men shall be realized, and long it shall abide,” Aragorn affirms. 

Legolas sits cross-legged on the ground, eyes drifting up to Remmirath’s scintillating net already flung across the darkling sky. The universe gleams apathetically upon the horrors lying in wait.

A hen clambers up Legolas’ arm with wings outstretched to find a perch on his shoulder; Legolas smiles his gratitude to it. 

“With me, and without me,” Aragorn says then.

Legolas bestows an exacting gaze on Aragorn. As decided as Edoras’ angles: “With you.”

Aragorn kneels, heedless of a hen madly plucking at his trousers. To cut that weighty pronouncement, he elaborates, “Regardless of what happens to me these next days, the goodness yet in Men, as we find here, shall outlast me -- whatever role I play. It shall outlast any one Man, or king of Men.” A smile then germinates on his face as he courteously adds: “Much in the manner your beautiful Woodland Realm has endured.”

“It fades,” Legolas says. 

Only after the syllables have drifted from his tongue do the words rattle him to recognize the profundity of his words. He thinks of his father. He thinks of Aragorn. He thinks of Gimli. He thinks of who he might be to them when the War is over, finds he cannot know. 

“Slowly and in its own time, but with the ebb and flow of seasons and tides and the conclusion of our Age, it relinquishes. So too do my Silvan kin relinquish.” He regards Aragorn candidly. “The Realm patiently crumbles to a ruin that your progeny shall know only as a couplet in the oldest songs, or a scene embroidered into tattered tapestries that fall apart in their hands.”

He grants Aragorn the smile he has sought. “Aragorn of Imladris, Aragorn of Gondor,” he murmurs with affection, “Aragorn of everywhere. Ranger and King. It is to you we relinquish. At last we relinquish, and we bequeath all still beautiful in Middle-earth to you, with hope.” He looks to the chickens and their peaceful work. “And relief.”

“But tell me,” Aragorn asks, “would _you_ relinquish so fast after the Age’s end?”

Legolas says, serene as the evening shrouding the horrors ahead, “No Elf should do anything so fast, I think.”

“Then I count myself fortunate for that.” 

Legolas delicately takes the hen from his shoulder and sets it on the earth to reunite with her friends. 

He feels Aragorn’s focus on him. He raises his gaze to meet it, pretends it doesn’t burn.

“That is my Mortal lot,” Aragorn surmises with humility both appealing and misguided. “We clutch arrogantly to what we love, pretending it shall stay always. When it asks to be let go, it is a harsh lesson, learning how to let go -- lest it tear away from us, taking a part of us with it.”

Legolas lists closer. “Oh, it is the same of Elves, so wistfully engrossed in keeping what we love evergreen that we hardly notice what we love has already left us,” Legolas says. “We are the same, Aragorn.”

Aragorn almost smiles, an overcast warmth. “I can feel that much will change soon.”

“Much has already changed,” Legolas replies. Aragorn passes a hand over his face, a disappointed concession to this truth. He marks the thin chicken tracks upon the dust; perhaps he divines some message in these frenetic constellations they construct. “But it needs not be sorrowful only, Aragorn. Here in this maelstrom, we may work to realize the world as we would dream it.”

“Thunderstorms in Mirkwood,” Aragorn says. “That is what I dream of.”

Legolas smiles, momentarily without words but caught in the lure of Aragorn’s.

“What do you dream?” Aragorn asks.

Legolas tips his head to the side. He considers this tender question before deciding to keep his words blithe: “Ah. In this waking moment, you have me dreaming that the fruition of the Age of Men sees our return to the Woodland Realm. And we see your thunderstorm together.”

Aragorn likes the sound of it; his shoulders square, a hopeful, brief movement.

“So please do not leave so fast,” Legolas says guilelessly.

“I cannot promise you, lest I disappoint you,” the Man admits.

Legolas’ lips part before he knows what to say. 

Aragorn thinks he is going to die.

Aragorn is looking at him, at his lips.

“That shall not happen,” Legolas says. “Not so long as I fight by your side.”

“And I would see you protected,” Aragorn responds, to the point. “Comforted.”

“I am.” Legolas smiles. “I have Gimli. And I have you.”

Aragorn reaches for Legolas and brushes a down feather from his hair. That hand pauses, then strokes against his cheek.

Legolas covers the hand with his own for the brief moment it is alive to him, before Aragorn takes his hand away and the scene perishes, just as this season of their lives together is perishing.

But then Aragorn leans in and kisses him like they have traveled backward in their tale, back to the far edge of Rohan where Aragorn’s boots were bloodied and sorrow hung woolen between them.

One of many sorrows in this War, and yet within it a glimpse of another world: the vast starry province of the way things could be. 

Like this. It could be like this.

Aragorn kisses him in the same chaste way.

Then, when they part, Legolas takes his turn to pursue the next kiss. He sits up, leaning in after Aragorn and ghosting his lips upon his, plain in his speechless ask, _Stay_.

He makes a sound in the back of his throat when Aragorn’s ruinous hands thread through his hair and hold tenderly. His lips move, a sound, and then Aragorn is kissing him firmly, kissing him until he’s just wanting, opening his mouth against Aragorn’s, ready to chase this want; and Aragorn answers with a shift of his weight, inclining forward to keep giving, as though this scene too shall perish.

And it does.

Legolas raises his leg and shoves his foot into Aragorn’s chest, nearly kicking him away in his push for distance. 

The chickens scatter, startled. Aragorn’s hand flies up to grip Legolas’ shoe against his heart. He steadies himself, an advent of apology on his face.

They look at each other.

“Refuse me,” Legolas says. His voice rings unfaltering, a fine mimicry of the staid snowy peaks to the south, but the way Aragorn regards him would have him believe his fear is splashed across his countenance. 

The Man shakes his head faintly, uncomprehending. 

“Refuse me,” he tries again, “for I would refuse you nothing. You must be the wiser of us, lest we…” 

He doesn’t know what he is afraid of, only that he fears. Only that Aragorn makes him tremble now, only that Aragorn’s hands, dark and generous, are ready to reach for him again, and it is unendurable.

And there is no place for this want, and he had accepted this, before. Before.

He draws in a breath. “Refuse me, Aragorn.”

Aragorn looks at him.

“Éomer is coming,” Legolas says then; Éomer’s lilting Rohirric drifts in on the wind -- shouts to others far off, curtly given orders, exhausted but persistent as Rohan’s terrain. 

The sound prevails on Aragorn to return to his feet with that innate surety; he offers a hand to Legolas, brings him upright.

Legolas lists on his feet a moment, and then gingerly brushes away the dusty footprint he has left on Aragorn’s chest. He nearly laughs in dismay.

“Oho,” Éomer announces, stopping in his tracks when he turns the shadowy corner alone. “The foxes got into the coop.” He is drunk on ale and apprehension, but only a little. He looks pleased to see them.

“An egg for safe passage back to the wilds?” Legolas offers, tossing him his own and smiling when Éomer cringes in attempting to catch the fragile thing. 

Legolas has lost his appetite; it is an easy parting.

“You know that you have only to ask, and the King’s kitchen will accommodate any request, any hour, for you both and our friend Dwarf.” He pauses. “Especially now.”

“They fear this is our final parting,” Aragorn confirms evenly.

Éomer spits, as though to rebuke Edoras’ soft evening. “They pity us.”

Aragorn doesn’t dispute this.

Legolas looks wordlessly to the both of them, Elven words of encouragement hollow in the face of Mortal dread.

“Someone from the kitchen keeps leaving apples on my cot,” Aragorn then remarks.

Éomer scratches at his neck. “Were you planning to share these pity-apples or will you continue your jealous hoarding?”

“They are the only things keeping me on my feet these nights conferring with Theoden King,” Aragorn excuses himself. His grave face insinuates a smile.

Éomer snorts. “Well, here I have my egg from an Elf,” he consoles himself. “And an Elf brings luck, they say.”

“Then what does a Man bring?” Legolas asks.

“A crude song, an inebriated scuffle, a clumsy attempt at charm,” Éomer reflects, “but overall faithful company over another ale, if you will both join me for a brief while.”

A serious look he spares Aragorn implies some misgiving about the march to Gondor he wants to air.

“Might I call on Gimli?” Legolas asks.

“You must,” Éomer smiles.

Legolas whisks out the gate without another word and steps lightly to where he had left Gimli whetting his axe blade. He idles halfway to the greensward, palms coming to rest upon a rare tree beside the path. An olive tree, from the balmy climes of Lebennin. What a carefree figure it makes, a character unlike any other tree he has known. What a sight it makes, so strange to Rohan. An Elf could relate.

He brushes against its skin, presses his cheek flush to it, and listens to its benevolent whisper. He could crumple against it. He could collapse and sink at its feet and water it with his tears until Edoras’ ash and grit blanket him and no one remembers his name, not even himself.

He restores his composure with a soft inhale. He returns to Gimli with cheer ready, asking the inexorable tide of time to carry him onward.

Time answers in lit beacons. Within three days, they are riding into the White Mountains, to fate.

+

Halfway to Dunharrow, they meet their first trial.

A handful of rogue orcs are embedded in the mountain passes. They have been waiting on Theoden’s party for so long it is a wonder they wait one second longer; they stay unseen long enough for dusk to dim the landscape and the first tent stakes to plant, the first ladies of the court to make their way to the raucous river nearby.

It is a suicidal dash to overtake Men few in number but fully armed and expecting bad tidings; the creatures explode into chaos as they rampage to their own deaths. 

Aragorn readily vaults into the fray. He finds Legolas and in between a fleche and a parry, jabs his finger in the direction of an orc needing an arrowhead’s bite. The arrow is sent singing into Aragorn’s foe and he briefly, breathlessly nods at Legolas before he gets lost in the bountiful bloodletting again. Legolas forthwith sinks another arrow into the throat of another orc -- stealing the opportunity to cull from Éomer, who halts in his charge at the orc and whirls around to see who is watching over him.

“Swift as foxes,” Éomer gives a wry smile.

In a moment of weakness, Legolas pauses in his tidy work to search for Aragorn amid the quick havoc.

Distraction damns him to embarrassment: he neglects to evade an orc before its wild frenzy catches him. It manages to slice a long crescent down his shoulder; searing pain unfurls for a moment, the wound shallow as an afterthought -- a stark contrast to the way the orc hunkers over and collapses then, handily dispatched by Éomer who has leapt to repay Legolas’ favor to him.

And then it is finished.

Éowyn, having only just missed the pandemonium despite her mad dash toward it, hurriedly stows the blade she had come wielding. Gimli repeats the word for “worried” in Sindarin under his breath.

It seems almost a benediction -- a brief boost to the Rohirrim’s spirits before the end. Doused in headstrong confidence, they make their camp with resolve anew. Down the way, the Rohirrim coalesce moth-like around Aragorn’s light, enlivened. Legolas follows on impulse, hoping to catch Aragorn’s eye. Just one of an eclipse of moths.

Acutely then, he feels the sting in his arm and halts in abashment; his folly has been made manifest, crimson blooming upon his clothing. Starved for the running water to wash clean his shortcomings, he steals toward the alpine river.

Gimli and Éomer will not be bothered to accompany him, so wound up in each other’s grim quips and dark laughter they are. Aragorn has gone missing in the throng, perhaps keeping the company of the Rohirrim, Theoden King -- perhaps fair Éowyn, or someone else.

At river’s edge, he undoes his braids methodically, casts off his stained clothing, and lowers himself into the punishing waters. A flurry of mountain-pure snow alights upon his head, lulling him into cold comfort.

Dipping his head under, the water from the cracking, thawing winter surges and wails over him. He stays within its keep for as long as his lungs will hold out.

The cold entices him to heat -- the flame in Aragorn, so bright he could forget Aragorn’s mortality. He thinks of the silver strands in Aragorn’s hair (fourteen; sometime in the last year he grew wearier, and older -- and, more than ever, good; fourteen). 

He thinks of his own imprudence, to speak to Aragorn what should have remained silent.

Pulled from reverie, he grows aware that Aragorn is waiting for him on the riverbank. After hesitating, he pops his head out of the water’s shelter and smiles.

“They told me you were injured,” Aragorn says over the shushing current, stern. He is shivering. “Éomer and Gimli. That there was blood.”

“Hardly at all,” Legolas excuses himself, staying crouched in the water.

“All the same,” Aragorn says.

He drifts a return to the river’s bubbling bank and sits to briskly scrub at his torn clothing while Aragorn keeps an impromptu lookout for him. 

The trees heave under the snow-dusting. Night, darker than the deepest crowns of trees, mutes the scenery.

He reaches for his clean tunic, but thinks twice when he notices, and then Aragorn finally sees for himself: “You are bleeding.” The diluted, bright color cascades down Legolas’ arm.

“It is superficial only,” Legolas says, slanting a smile. “A fit reward for foolishness.”

Aragorn only says, “Let me take care of you.”

Legolas knits his brows, hesitating. “Oh,” he supplies.

A gaze chases Legolas’. A hand is offered to Legolas. 

He accepts both in this unpeopled enclave, where only Aragorn can trace the doubt cracking through his placid mien. Only Aragorn knows why.

When he stands with his wet personal effects to pull on his leggings, dripping and immaculate but for the wash of red down his arm, Aragorn shoulders his bow and quiver for him and draws his cloak around Legolas’ shoulders. It reeks of horses and pipesmoke; Legolas buries his face briefly into it as though it were a plush blanket.

“Share with me,” Legolas offers, made bold by the bruising waters. He drapes half the cloak over Aragorn’s shivering shoulders. He pulls in to huddle against the Man. Aragorn fixes an arm around his bare torso.

Together they retreat to the campsite.

“It’s the foxes again,” Éomer calls from where he stokes a fire, almost rousing Gimli who lies next to him. He seems, in spite of the camp’s damp apprehension, satisfied with himself.

Aragorn doesn’t need to ask Legolas into his tent. Legolas only tarries outside for a moment, separating to drape his soaked clothing on a few budding bushes beside the entryway. Something in the act quiets him, a quiet of finality. 

He could meander the expanse of his imagination, asking what he thinks will happen, but Aragorn is waiting for him, and time is ruthless in its rule.

A single tent, fit for a king -- and furnished for Gondor’s heir by Theoden himself. How well Aragorn adapts to change, somberly receiving his burgeoning role and its spoils alongside its ponderous burdens. 

How noble a Man he looks in this liminal space, on the eve of still more death. 

He richly deserves his luxuries, but eagerly shares them: he spreads a rabbit fur blanket across his cot for Legolas, pours him water from a sparkling carafe. Banking to his fraying rucksack, memento from a chapter of his life fast slipping away, he produces pristine gauze dressings he’d pilfered from Edoras -- and an amber oil. 

“Your arm,” he says, barring any protestation with a tone certain as a beech tree. 

Legolas sinks to the cot and lets down the cloak from his shoulder, baring his blood-smeared arm -- and the shallow wound arcing moonlike up to his shoulder. 

The injury is trifling, not worth Aragorn’s time, but he treats it as though it is: he uses a towel to soak up the blood, carefully wipes the mess from his skin, and applies a dressing soaked in the oil.

Legolas smiles, struck with a nostalgia that leaves him pliable as soft clay. “It smells of the late summer forest,” he says wonderingly.

Aragorn hums; he bows his head over his work, his sun-warm hand pleasingly rough across Legolas’ skin. Legolas cherishes the feel, coarse like the conversation of crows in towering trees. “It is myrrh. I acquired a fair amount of it just beyond the Sea of Rhûn not too long before War’s beginning. It aids in healing remarkably well, so long as the injury is not too grievous. It takes away the pain.”

It occurs to Legolas that he shall not hear these small anecdotes spoken so intimately to him again. The world of Men moves too quickly to find Aragorn here again like this: uncrowned yet, with his focus and his hands intent upon Legolas.

“I have found it devilishly hard to come by elsewhere. It seems a well-kept secret, although the marketplaces of the Eastlands would leave you dizzy with the fragrance.” Deftly, he winds the gauze dressings around his arm and secures them. “Though it is a pleasant disorientation.”

He finds Legolas’ eyes with a need to please, scarcely cognizant of his own power. His hand still keeps Legolas’ arm in its hold. “Is it alright?”

Legolas nods, not wishing to interrupt Aragorn’s narrative. “Thank you. You need not have,” he says, guilelessly.

Aragorn’s gaze shifts to Legolas’ uncovered shoulder. He is thinking. He distrusts himself, Isildur’s heir. And it is Legolas’ fault.

Legolas carefully lifts his arms; finding only the bite of his fallibility laid bare, he unseeingly reaches back to refashion his fishtail braid. Aragorn’s cloak pools at his waist. “How odd to call one’s self a warrior,” he finds himself reflecting, wearing a smile to veil his chagrin, “and then so easily be surprised by a fell creature amid the very warfare he had sought.”

“I had not known it was possible to surprise you,” Aragorn says, charitable, following Legolas’ meticulous fingers working in his hair.

“Nor had I,” Legolas idly replies. “But perhaps ere we reach our final trials, I needed to learn a necessary lesson in keeping out of ruminations and ever upon toes instead. How silly to be caught so off-balance.”

“What ruminations?”

Legolas smiles at Aragorn politely. He glances to the closed tent entrance as he entertains fantasies of fleeing from these troubles of his own design, scaling a large and patient oak, and stowing himself away under its lush eaves through the seasons until all the unspoken things forget to be said.

Aragorn knows what ruminations occupy him; they occupy Aragorn, too. The tension edges into the space between their bodies where they sit; the tension colors Aragorn’s question -- he wants something from Legolas. He wants a way in.

The tension keeps Legolas’ mouth shut, unanswering.

“Would that I had not been such a fool, and had sought to be where you were,” Aragorn says then.

“You were,” Legolas contends.

“No. I mean to say, I delayed in finding you when we ought to have settled the unsaid well before we rode from Edoras. I dallied. You paid for it, waiting on me this long. Expecting me.”

Legolas realizes, with a glacial certainty, that Aragorn knows -- had seen -- Legolas’ frivolous impulse in the heat of battle, searching over the heads of orcs and Men for him.

What does it say about him? 

What must Aragorn think of him as a hunter and companion? What does it say of his irresponsibility for himself? Is his fate to be known as the inept, naive prince hopelessly tangled up in his own melodrama -- taking up time and bandages from the next king of Gondor?

Ashamed, his hands drift down from his work on his half-finished plait. He settles, spirits sunken like a pebble in the riverbed, for twisting a lock of hair shiftlessly around his fingers.

He musters, “Then we share the guilt, Aragorn.”

“No, Legolas,” Aragorn declares with a gentle forthrightness. “You see, I do not have the luxury of time I did as a Ranger, expecting my fortunes and my role to remain unchanged -- expecting those I love to ever be with me and for me.” He presses a knuckle to his mouth, going away to a private thought, before he says: “I can no longer languish like that, weighing my oughts and ought-nots as those wavering kings of old did. The world changes around me, and I would heed it.”

He catches Legolas in an unflinching gaze, a wolf’s mettle. “Much has changed already,” he echoes Legolas.

“If you must condemn yourself so,” Legolas says, “then I beseech you, condemn me for my part, as well. At least we may keep each other company in perdition.”

Aragorn inhales as if to pluck an excuse from the cold draft in the tent. But then he exhales a smile in answer, brushes his hair from his eyes.

“Uncontestable is time’s pull,” Legolas concedes. “Inescapable as the tides.” He manages a small smile back to Aragorn, reassuring. “But take comfort knowing that though the world changes, I will ever be with you, and for you. That shall not change so long as you have want of my companionship.”

“I want it,” Aragorn says, watchful of Legolas.

That is to say, Aragorn’s attention burns on him like a white-hot flame. 

Legolas wants to run his fingers through the flame. 

“So it is yours,” Legolas replies.

“But what comfort may I give you?” Aragorn asks.

Legolas tilts his head, discomfited. “Aragorn,” he nearly admonishes, but he quiets.

As Aragorn reaches out for him, he closes the cloak snugly around himself and rises with a casual grace from the cot.

Away from the other, he halts at the table covered by a yellowing map. Mindlessly, he studies the illustrated topography of Middle-earth, tucking his unfinished hair behind his ear. 

Anticipating.

He feels Aragorn approach behind him.

Intentionally as the vine’s tendrils snake about the object of its desire, he speaks to the inky scribbles of wilderness, calligraphic curves of waterways: “I would ask for what you would like to give me.”

“And you would refuse me nothing,” Aragorn echoes Legolas again, readily. The words have been ringing riotous in his mind. 

Legolas glances back toward him, expression closed. Can he see it on him? This keen Ranger who could bid him to -- command him to -- with just a look.

Can he see it on him -- what Legolas imagines, and then fears, and then imagines again?

“I would refuse you nothing, Aragorn,” he says.

“Then let me know what you are thinking, Legolas, ere we fall prey to fate.”

Legolas’ index finger strokes at the map somewhere near Khand, rhythmically. A needy tell.

A tell Aragorn sees.

He draws in close. He encircles an arm around Legolas’ front -- a simple hold that might as well shackle him, vulnerable, against the earth. 

Aragorn’s flame will burn him down to nothing, he is sure of it.

“Let me,” Aragorn murmurs close to his ear.

 _Cruel that fate shall soon draw you away from my side and leave me seared with the want of you_ , he is thinking.

_Cruel what sadnesses we bestow upon each other._

_Cruel to want, to make known the want, and then to withdraw._

Legolas doesn’t want to be cruel.

He tells the Middle-earth spread before him, “I would remember this season of life spent with you once it is perished.”

Aragorn answers with that hand, reaching around to brush against Legolas’ cheek and suggest him to turn his head, to look at him. The sheer force of tenderness almost drives Legolas away to seek safety. Almost.

He meets the breathing thing that has been dogging his steps since the night in Mirkwood, the thing called _Ruin_ , with his hand closing over Aragorn’s wrist.

“I am selfish,” Aragorn condemns himself. “Too selfish to refuse you.”

Thought washes cleanly from Legolas’ mind.

“Put your hands on me,” Legolas says, “so that I remember.”

It is a slow unraveling. Keeping Legolas close, Aragorn untwines the loose, neglected braid in his hair, the last thing adorning him but for the cloak held at his shoulders. He lingers within the act of running his fingers through the light tresses. When he smoothes the long locks aside, his fingers make contact with skin, listing down Legolas’ neck.

His hands drift to his shoulders, winding around front to trace along his collarbones. Fingertips pet at the hollow of his throat -- and then he hooks a thumb into the cloak and tugs.

Legolas loosens his hold on the cloak, feeling the draft upon bare shoulders, his chest, his arms. And Aragorn touches where he finds uncovered -- fingers splaying over nipples, down to count the divots of his ribcage, and then further to Legolas’ navel, to the waist of his leggings, to where he keeps a tenuous hold on the cloak.

Inclining his head to the side, he invites Aragorn to touch, keep touching. Aragorn presses his mouth to the exposed curve between neck and shoulder as his hands dip under the cloak’s rippling folds.

Thumbs against hipbones, thumbs coaxing at the juncture of hip and thigh, fingers pulling and suggesting his thighs apart just enough, enough -- burning Legolas through, raucous -- 

Legolas turns and pitches into the Man like a snapped sapling. 

“Hold me,” he breathes.

He winds his arms around him and hooks his leg around his waist, nearly climbing him in an inelegant embrace. He is unable to help himself. 

His weight surges and relinquishes against the Man, stripped of decorum under the enormity of where he has found himself.

Aragorn entraps him, holds fiercely so it aches. He feels the Man’s eyelashes brush against his shoulder. It is insurmountable. 

_Let me remember_ , he wills himself. He slips a hand in Aragorn’s hair, glides his palm across the plane of Aragorn’s back -- still clothed while Legolas is coming apart at the seams; what does that say about Legolas? 

It incites Legolas to move again, defiant -- a tug to extricate himself from the cloak twisted uselessly around his hips and legs.

“Undress me,” Legolas says.

Aragorn obeys immediately, dropping the cloak to the floor, fingers hasty in loosening and shoving his leggings down, unwilling to be apart for long. He only parts for long enough to kneel before him and tug them off Legolas, toss them aside without a parting glance. To gaze up at him.

And then Legolas touches his fingers to Aragorn’s chin to draw him back up to his kingly stature.

And then Aragorn’s coarse palms are upon all of Legolas, wherever he can find to touch.

Aragorn hedges him in against the map, panting as though he has chased him down so far -- so long -- snared him upon this table like some wild creature, overpowered him, and pierced his heart now --

“Kiss me,” Legolas says, the hush of his command interrupted by Aragorn’s lips crushing against his. The din outside deadens, and Aragorn kisses him. The world of before falls away; Aragorn kisses him.

There is that thrill as before, but deeper and fiercer now. Now, they have found each other in this liminal, brief world while they wait to ford the flood of War to the other side, where the land is generous with long-sought endings to every story except his and Aragorn’s. This duplicate world within the tent’s fabric and wax is nearly the same world hurrying on outside it: it is a world laden with frightful joys and sorrows, but it is also a world where Aragorn will return to him again, and again, and again.

The world that could be, but is not.

Here in this liminal world, he sits himself on the edge of the table against which Aragorn devours him. Legolas asks for more with a thigh slipping between Aragorn’s legs and beckoning up gently against him. It prises a hitched breath out of Aragorn, earns Legolas an adulatory, bruising kiss.

He asks and receives. The joy of being known leaves him dizzy.

“Move against me,” Legolas whispers against his mouth, and the Man spreads his thighs, rutting against him, his arousal insistent inside his trousers. Legolas braces himself with a hand back upon the table and fingers twisted into Aragorn’s shirt. He begins a broken rhythm with his hips, learning the angles they fit -- more, more, and again. An apparition of a dreamy smile flits across Aragorn’s face before his hands fall to grip his rear firmly, moving in time with him. 

The furtive nudges of hips smooth into a single-minded frotting against one another. “Oh,” Legolas exhales.

It is overtaking, the ascent of pleasure amid the unaware world outside; the faraway horses and passing conversations, all periphery to the here-and-now. A frisson. A flurry of snow, a furtive seduction, before the blizzard buries him.

Legolas rolls his hips against Aragorn, kisses him with a mounting urgency that Aragorn meets. He pulls at Aragorn’s collar, demanding. When he licks into Aragorn’s mouth, heat and silk, he feels Aragorn’s teeth at his lower lip and muffles a sound, a propitiation to Aragorn to give him more.

Aragorn murmurs, “Legolas,” just to say it, just a word that means something to Aragorn, Legolas could not say what it means to Aragorn, only that it means something, but it is enough to overcome Legolas, to hear his name this way from the Ranger who had smiled at him in the rainy ash tree in rainy Mirkwood, with rain in his eyes as he told him, _What beauty_. 

He flows forward to press another kiss to the Man’s lips, and another, another, until he is swooning with a crazed sweetness -- like honey, like falling.

“Let me,” he says, adopting Aragorn’s simple language of desire as his palm skims against Aragorn’s arousal to loosen the ties on his trousers.

Aragorn handles him away from the table to walk him, clumsy with his face buried in Legolas’ hair, his neck, backward to the cot. Legolas works at the clunky sword belt at the Man’s hips to disarm him. 

His sword drops to the floor with a momentous thud. 

They ease onto the cot and immediately Legolas sinks to his elbows to nuzzle at the swell in the Man’s trousers, possessing little experience but a hard craving to do. His fingers curl into the laces of Aragorn’s trousers, untying them.

Aragorn positions Legolas close to his side -- hands at his thighs, his rear, lingering -- instinctive for a Man with Man’s usual share of experience. The thought of Aragorn having done this before strings Legolas into a momentary, apprehensive pause to catch his breath. 

Then Aragorn delivers him from his thoughts with a caress of his hair. “You needn’t -- ,“ begins Aragorn, but his voice falters when Legolas mouths insistently along the outline of his arousal through the fabric.

Aragorn moves away only to finish the work at his trousers Legolas had started, and then he is stroking himself impulsively, at the mercy of his own need. Legolas leans his cheek against Aragorn’s hipbone and watches him pleasure himself -- until Aragorn's rhythm goes unsteady with subtle but marked anticipation.

“Tell me,” Legolas says, eyes up to him as he replaces the Ranger’s hand on his cock with his own, “if I do as you like.”

He asks himself how many conventions he tramples upon in this moment, the Elven prince of Mirkwood naked on his hands and knees, pliant for a Man he finds irresistible. He doesn’t care, because as he drags his tongue up Aragorn’s length, he compels a noise from Aragorn, faint and bone-deep -- he compels hands to tangle into his hair and dig against his scalp just so.

He wraps his mouth tight around him, needing to draw more out of him.

The reeds far down by the abandoned riverbank sigh, or is it Aragorn, is it Legolas -- the world heaves a sigh of pleasure and and it sinks into a swaying rhythm, a hope for more, more of the sameness of this, more of the newness of it.

Aragorn’s dark gaze on him is unwavering, utterly rapt when Legolas glances up, bobbing his head in a building cadence. 

The sensation of Aragorn’s hands gathering his hair away from his face, a gentle tugging, sweeps gratification down his spine; he shivers and takes Aragorn’s cock deeper in his mouth. 

The cot undulates as the Man shifts, a mire under their knees. “I want to feel you,” Aragorn says, voice rough.

He nods without taking his mouth from Aragorn’s cock, overly eager. And then a myrrh-slicked finger strokes against his entrance. Again apprehension. Again wondering. Again wanting. Legolas backs himself against that hand -- tilting his head to watch Aragorn watching him.

His back arches when a solid finger only just slips in. A shallow, swimming pressure melts him off-balance, presses a small sound of satisfaction from him. Aragorn’s finger pets him open, taking his time with him.

“Good?” Aragorn asks, tone hemmed with heat.

Legolas swallows him down and slurps appreciatively around his cock.

Another hard finger enters him; Legolas whimpers and stills for a long heartbeat -- those fingers stay light and languid inside him. They stay for long enough that he begins squirming them in deeper.

The fingers stroke further, further into him in answer, in and out -- and then Aragorn’s cock pops wetly out of Legolas’ mouth. His arms go weak and his forehead drops against the blankets like a wilting flower. He moans, a low, keening noise that tapers to breathless, clipped little sounds as Aragorn curls his fingers in him.

Adrift, he lifts his head and laps at Aragorn’s cock through the assailing pleasure. Aragorn’s hips begin moving against his flushed lips -- minute movements, familiar self-denial in those small nudges. Legolas seeks to undo that discipline with his mouth, meeting him sloppily, encouraging more from him, which Aragorn gives him, until --

“Come here,” Aragorn says.

It is a mindless moving, lying down face to face on the creaking cot, and Aragorn’s strong hand drawing up his leg to reach under and slide those slick, strong fingers inside him again. Eyes falling half-shut, Legolas guides Aragorn, hand on his jaw, into a kiss as Aragorn’s calloused fingers move faster in him. 

The sweeping sensation reduces him to little more than a thing of desire, utterly unbound from the forces that bind. He bucks down his hips in staccato starts, wanting those fingers to claim him as he grabs both their cocks, trapped between them, together to stoke. Pleasure, that undertow, whisks him far away from care for dignity.

Aragorn finds Legolas’ lips again and, mouth against mouth, murmurs, “Want more?”

“Yes, yes,” he rushes. He captures Aragorn with a leg tossed around his waist, drawing himself in unthinkably close.

A third finger presses into him. Legolas falters, shuddering. His eyes go wide. “Hah,” he manages. “Ah. Ah --”

Aragorn’s fingers still inside him. 

Legolas turns his face against the fur, eyelashes fluttering to the intensity. He feels full, he feels himself slowly dismantled, a rending apart. 

“Too much,” Aragorn suggests for him, softly.

Quickly, Legolas shakes his head, closes his eyes to compose himself. Hand outflung, wrist curling around Aragorn’s neck. Stay.

Aragorn uses his free hand to brush away the hair that veils Legolas’ face when it falls from his shoulder. 

Thighs shaking, he keeps his focus on Aragorn. He writhes his hips, achingly slow, to keep feeling Aragorn all through this maddening tongue of the flame. 

“I never could have hoped for you,” Aragorn says, reverence in his voice. “For this.”

A smile, faint as though sunlight behind a bird’s outstretched wing, crosses Legolas’ face. “I did,” he whispers.

Aragorn’s hand moves between them to stroke them both, taking over for Legolas -- (“Let me,” he murmurs) -- “Did you?” he asks. “When?”

Legolas closes his eyes, opens them when he finds himself missing Aragorn’s face. He squirms gingerly against Aragorn’s fingers. “When you were drunk with me -- when you told me,” he breathes in, “I looked hallowed.”

“You liked that?”

In spite of himself, in spite of how far they’ve journeyed this dead end together, Legolas feels his face flush, and breathes a little laugh. 

A slow smile tugs at Aragorn’s face to hear him laugh. Brilliant warmth.

" -- I liked everything,” Legolas says with a pained sincerity. “Everything of you.”

“I thought of kissing you,” Aragorn says, his slow strokes of their cocks quickening -- just enough, enough that Legolas’ lashes flutter again. 

He puts his hand over Aragorn’s, his provenance of pleasure. They stroke together. 

“That night. I warred with myself.” Aragorn’s heavy breathing yields to a humming sigh when Legolas runs his thumb over Aragorn’s tip. “-- Could you tell?”

Legolas makes a sound in the back of his throat, shakes his head. Pleasure begins its ascent in a sultry, slow arc, how Aragorn wants it -- to keep Legolas tumbled and felled someplace half-dreamt.

“I thought,” he nearly stutters, moving his hips plaintively to ask of Aragorn’s giving fingers, “you thought I was strange.”

Aragorn’s fingers move so briefly, so lightly in Legolas even while his gaze pins him down, like he’s toying with him -- Legolas nuzzles into the fur with a fitful purr.

“I wanted to kiss you when I took that crown from your head, and you smiled as though you might fly away, a bird from the cage.” And he leans in to press his lips to Legolas’ softly.

“And I wanted to kiss you the night when you invoked Túrin’s name, fearless of the stars.” 

A firm, deep kiss --

“And I wanted to kiss you every time I heard you singing to the horses in the dawn. Every time.” 

He kisses him. His fingers thrust into him full and sweet.

Legolas’ jaw goes slack -- it’s a futile fight to keep quiet, keep their liminal world unmappable. Aragorn presses his forehead to Legolas as he settles into a rhythm, fingers nestling deep, and out, and full, deep.

Legolas licks at Aragorn’s jawline with its scratch of stubble, his temple; tastes salt and ash; licks along Aragorn’s lower lip where smiles visit rarely and beautifully, licks tongue to tongue before Aragorn shoves his lips to Legolas’. A hand fists in his hair. A moan, muffled, before Legolas sinks his teeth into Aragorn’s shoulder; prayerful, possessive.

It makes him want to throw himself to Aragorn, unbidden, tell Aragorn to have it, take all of it, take him. It makes him want to tempt the judgment of the Valar -- he wants their apathetic eyes to see him, to brand him the sinner.

Burning with it.

“More,” Legolas growls against Aragorn’s shoulder, teetering on the ledge, just before they leap far away from this night. “More, Aragorn, more -- .” His words spiral into incoherence when Aragorn pulls out his fingers, slides two in, out, three in, out, two. The nearly obscene depth of intimacy unravels him.

The claustrophobic cot’s wooden legs creaking under them, upon this unmarked grave of a night. Legolas, vanquished, buries himself in taste, touch, the sound of Aragorn pleased, the way Aragorn makes a fervent, low sound when Legolas squeezes their cocks and drags Aragorn’s cock along his navel to feel his precome on his skin. 

There is a holiness in it, that he could have Aragorn, right here, so taken with him, so hungry for him, his breathing ragged, storm-grey eyes pursuing him, pursuing him. With the bedding wound like ivy around them, with the netted stars cast about him and hauling him, helpless, into their keep, it is enough.

Aragorn’s fingers work faster, curving in him relentlessly. Legolas bucks, his whimpers rising a pitch, almost hysterical -- he fucks himself onto Aragorn’s fingers shamelessly. He grinds himself against that hand. 

“Come for me,” grits Aragorn. 

Legolas’ heel kicks down compulsively against Aragorn’s back and Aragorn pushes up his leg, splaying him out open against the cot and kneeling over him, his cock heavy where it grazes against his thigh; and he keeps going, he keeps going.

“Make me,” Legolas pleads, “make me -- .“ His words die, his eyes rolling into his skull. 

He wants to fall over the edge. He doesn’t need to be pushed.

Fingers fill him so deep, beckoning in him, and he goes bowstring taut. 

A singing silence like the arrow has flown.

A sob. He falls.

Buried.

What an agonizing joy to be.

The world swoons back to bleary life with sound, at first. Distantly, Legolas hears a “mmh” and then “oh” from Aragorn; disoriented, he watches the hand drawing him into an embrace returning sticky and bright with fresh blood. “Your arm,” Aragorn says, hoarse; he almost moves away from this liminal world of blankets and warmth.

Legolas sways to his knees and overtakes Aragorn, sinking him back into the cot. 

Aragorn looks up at him like he’s something hallowed. Then his eyes close, because Legolas is kissing him.

It’s just another transgression against time: the way he takes his time devoting lips and tongue, with painstaking attention, to Aragorn’s arousal, listening to him pant and feeling his hips lift for it. 

He has wanted this, been wanting Legolas. He is so close.

Time hounds them in these moments.

“Legolas,” Aragorn breathes, careless of that time.

Legolas takes him deep in his mouth with an indulgent desire: 

desire to taste the Man’s arousal thick and fighting release against his tongue, desire to understand the primal language of his hands threading through his hair; desire to listen to the sound of him murmuring half-thought, murky, filthy words; desire to feel him surrender, dropping back against the cot to simply take what Legolas gives him -- and, when he taps at Legolas, presses a hand to his shoulder, swallow him when he comes hard, lapping him up even after he’s spent. 

Blood slinks down Legolas’ arm, dark and rich.

Aragorn hasn’t forgotten. He lies sprawled on the fur for only a few moments to stare unseeingly at the rippling cotton and oil canvas that hides them away. A smile flickers across his face. 

He catches his breath. He refocuses on Legolas.

Legolas wipes his mouth and smiles.

He hauls himself up then, drawing Legolas close with a hand at the nape of his neck -- kissing him, kissing him like he would worship him, until Legolas’ toes are curling to find purchase against this duplicate world. 

Legolas clutches at his wrist, his thigh. _Stay_ , he insists, unwise. _Stay_.

But time heralds in the rumble of the War’s designs. Tomorrow to Dunharrow. Tomorrow to greet fate halfway.

Aragorn adeptly recomposes himself at a small tub in the corner before returning to Legolas with gaze unclouded, more water, more wound dressings. “Lie down,” he says to Legolas.

The Man puts him back together while Legolas lies curled onto his side, looking up at him.

When he is finished, he must answer to the Men of the Mark, to Theoden King, and his nature forbids him to leave anyone waiting on him. He goes outside. Túrin roams westward in the sky, solitary. The light snow has melted away into a rainy gloom that patters incessantly on the tent.

And then Aragorn returns with Legolas’ clothing in hand.

“Shall I go on to my tent?” Legolas asks, accepting the clothing.

“No,” Aragorn says. “No. I will gladly return your clothing to the rain if it would give you some reason to stay here a while longer.” 

Legolas laughs. He pulls back on his clothing while Aragorn goes quiet. 

Where is it he goes?

Legolas redoes his hair. He combs through the tangles left there by Aragorn’s hands, erases the mess they made together, and remakes himself into a warrior. He rebraids his hair efficiently, second nature. A Woodland Elf, he has ever inhabited the domain of strife.

The first sprouts of spring begin wrestling out of the soil, and, lonesome in the darkness older than words, look around for the morning.

The birds begin their singing, calling on the sun. The sky evolves to an overcast grey, the color of Aragorn’s eyes.

No one sleeps here, clinging to the precipice, the collapse clamoring beneath their feet.

He glances to Aragorn through the momentous silence. And isn’t it strange, the way that despite all of this, Aragorn is watching him and smiling like there is no other world he would choose but this one.

+

Long before the Three Hunters reach the Pathways of the Dead, the ghosts wraithe through him in the dull forest. They wish to be known. There is no sadness like theirs.

They implore Legolas to heed their grief, and he does. He speaks to them under his breath, lulling them to a turbulent hush with the story of his journey. He tells them, and they understand he is unafraid.

He finds a glossy black raven’s feather waiting on the ground for him, and ties it into his plait. _It is for you_ , he says with his eyes forward to the glowering Dark Door hewn into the mountains. _And all that is unhealed in you_.

Aragorn now arrays himself in the unquestioning confidence he thinks he must, in order to be worthy of wielding Andúril. He has always been worthy. He will never understand this. 

Aragorn understands, at least, that with him stand an Elf and Dwarf who have always understood this for him; and it is enough, because time has run out and it shall be what it shall be.

“What do you dream?” Aragorn, dreaming of thunderstorms in Mirkwood, had asked him.

A dream, something sweet to pray for -- like presenting Sindarin poetry to the noble Lady of Lothlórien.

Legolas, empty-handed, does not dream so hopefully as that. His time has passed. The hourglass emptied and the sand spilled into the mountain soil until it didn’t care even to remember what came before.

Empty-handed, he takes Gimli’s. Gimli’s hand is clammy with terror. He holds firmly.

When the cloven stone walls rise up to close in on them, casting blue shadows upon their heads, Legolas finds a flowering shrub. It rustles its hello to him.

With the emptiness of his hands, he finds a fallen flower within the tangle of wood and leaf and places it in Gimli’s hand.

“Look, Gimli,” Legolas says, “the earth comes alive again even before the realm of the dead, as it ever shall.”

“May it remember us fondly,” the Dwarf croaks.

“Here is the resurrection,” Aragorn says to himself. He steels himself, and then smiles, slow as the sun emerges from the fog of war. “The resurrection of hope.”

He turns, hand leaving Andúril’s hilt, to Legolas and Gimli. His gaze softens. “How far we have come, my friends,” he says. He places his hands, the hands of a king, on Legolas and Gimli’s shoulders. It is such a familiar gesture. Legolas relishes it. “I do not possess the words,” he says, “to express how better a Man I have become for your company and your faith in me.” (Gimli hmphs, touched.) “Much must change now, for the good of this folding Age and the nascent next. For our peoples. For the restoration of the land, for the trees that would come to fruition knowing only peace.” 

He takes a measured breath. “And yet, I hope we three shall remain we three, after all is said and done.”

Legolas smiles.

Aragorn pauses, drops his gaze and blinks hard.

Sound fails; touch suffices: Legolas and Gimli close in on him like a landslide, winding their arms around him, harboring him. “Good, good,” crows Gimli, gentle as he taps his head against Aragorn’s chest. “So let us keep that hope alive, Aragorn.”

“Here are two I will follow till the end,” Legolas says, leaning his head against Aragorn’s shoulder.

They hold tight.

In another world, the War falls asleep, this Age glides to the next as naturally as air, and in the coming days Legolas finds Aragorn again, and again, and again.

In this world, Legolas relinquishes himself to his fate, empty-handed. With empty hands, he caresses Aragorn’s face before Aragorn guides his palm against his brief Mortal heartbeat; he coaxes Gimli to join him as they approach the uncertain dark; he traces the stone to learn its ageless sorrow.

They say the way is shut. But then it opens. 

This world perishes as the light does, prevailed upon by darkness hopeful for a star.

Legolas closes his eyes to greet his strange fate in this night land. He dreams of dawn, the horses hoofing the earth in wait, and Aragorn’s voice singing him outside to the sunrise.


End file.
